Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:19:23 GMT

Your child's milk tooth can save her life

Is your child about to lose her milk tooth? Instead of throwing it away, you can now opt to use it to harvest stem cells in a dental stem cell bank for future use in the face of serious ailments. Now that's a tooth fairy story coming to life.

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Still relatively new in India, dental stem cell banking is fast gaining popularity as a more viable option over umbilical cord blood banking.

Stem cell therapy involves a kind of intervention strategy in which healthy, new cells are introduced into a damaged tissue to treat a disease or an injury.

"The umbilical cord is a good source for blood-related cells, or hemaotopoietic cells, which can be used for blood-related diseases, like leukaemia (blood cancer). Having said that, blood-related disorders constitute only four percent of all diseases," Shailesh Gadre, founder and managing director of the company Stemade Biotech, told IANS.

"For the rest of the 96 percent tissue-related diseases, the tooth is a good source of mesenchymal (tissue-related) stem cells. These cells have potential application in all other tissues of the body, for instance, the brain, in case of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's; the eye (corneal reconstruction), liver (cirrhosis), pancreas (diabetes), bone (fractures, reconstruction), skin and the like," he said.

Mesenchymal cells can also be used to regenerate cardiac cells.

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