Porcine tooth germ cell conditioned medium can induce odontogenic differentiation of human dental pulp stem cells

It is suggested that the differentiation of tooth-derived stem cells is modulated by the local microenvironment in which they reside. Previous studies have indicated that tooth germ cell-conditioned medium (TGC-CM) holds the potential to induce dental pulp stem cells (DPSCs) to differentiate into the odontogenic lineage. Nevertheless, human TGC-CM (hTGC-CM) is not feasible in practical application, so we conjectured that xenogenic TGC-CM might exert a similar influence on human dental stem cells. In this study, we chose swine as the xenogenic origin and compared the effect of porcine tooth germ cell-conditioned medium (pTGC-CM) with its human counterpart on human DPSCs. Morphological appearance, colony-forming assay, in vitro multipotential ability, protein and gene expression of the odontogenic phenotype and the in vivo differentiation capacity of DPSCs were evaluated. The results showed that pTGC-CM exerted a similar effect to hTGC-CM in inducing human DPSCs to present odontogenic changes, which were indicated by remarkable morphological changes, higher multipotential capability and the expression of some odontogenic markers in gene and protein levels. Besides, the in vivo results showed that pTGC-CM-treated DPSCs, similar to hTGC-CM-treated DPSCs, could form a more regular dentine-pulp complex. Our data provided the first evidence that pTGC-CM is able to exert almost the same effect on DPSCs with hTGC-CM. The observations suggest that the application of xenogenic TGC-CM may facilitate generating bioengineered teeth from tooth-derived stem cells in future.