Tooth Regenerative Therapy, Approached from Organogenesis

Regenerative medicine is expected to be a novel therapeutic system in this century [1–3]. The human body consists of 200 cell species generated from immature stem cells. In the 1990s, a treatment transplanting hematopoietic stem cells to replace all blood cells was established and successfully cured leukemia [4]. With this as amodel, stem cell transplantation therapy is being developed to restore the partial loss of organ function [5, 6]. The ultimate goal of regenerative medicine is to replace loss or damaged organs with artificial organs, so-called organ replacement therapy. Technical development to produce “tissues” made of a single cell species modeled on skin, bone, heart muscle, and cornea is advancing, but little development of organs per se has been attempted. In the sections that follow, we discuss why and explain how we are trying with the problems of “tooth regeneration”.