Establishing Organoids from Human Tooth as a Powerful Tool Toward Mechanistic Research and Regenerative Therapy

Teeth are of key importance in life not only for food mastication and speech but also for psychological well-being. Knowledge on human tooth development and biology is scarce. In particular, not much is known about the tooth's epithelial stem cells and their function. We succeeded in developing a novel organoid model starting from human tooth tissue (i.e., dental follicle, isolated from extracted wisdom teeth). The organoids are robustly and long-term expandable and recapitulate the proposed human tooth epithelial stem cell compartment in terms of marker expression as well as functional activity. In particular, the organoids are capable to unfold an ameloblast differentiation process as occurring in vivo during amelogenesis. This unique organoid model will provide a powerful tool to study not only human tooth development but also dental pathology, and may pave the way toward tooth-regenerative therapy. Replacing lost teeth with a biological tooth based on this new organoid model could be an appealing alternative to the current standard implantation of synthetic materials.