Regenerative potential of dental pulp mesenchymal stem cells harvested from high caries patient's teeth

Dental pulp are known to contains stem cells or dentinogenic progenitors that are responsible for dentin repair. Dental pulp Stem cells from Human Exfoliated Deciduous teeth (SHED) represent a population of postnatal stem cells capable of extensive proliferation and multipotential or multilineage differentiations. This potential for tissue regeneration has become the current basis for dental pulp stem cell banking. Here, we have attempted to develop a protocol for harvesting stem cells from patients with High Caries tooth, which are most often electively discarded. We have characterized the stem cells with mesenchymal stem cell markers and have compared their potential to grow in culture, doubling times, and differentiate into different lineages, with normal bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). We observed that the MSCs from dental pulp grew faster, with lower doubling time, and had equal efficiency in differentiating to various lineages, when subjected to standard directed differentiation protocols. This paper establishes that discarded High Carries Tooth can be a good source for regenerative medicine and also could be a potential source for MSCs and dental pulp MSC banking.