New toothpaste can regrow teeth

The $3 billion global market for toothpaste is on the verge of a shake-up as new biotechnologies come through that not only curtail sensitivity problems but will also enable teeth to re-grow to fill in small cavities. Today’s toothpaste comes in a plethora of flavours and can of course whiten teeth but from a medical viewpoint, little has progressed in the 40 years since fluoride was added to fight decay.
Now though scientists in various countries have developed differing technologies that produce similar results to deaden sensitivity and recalcify the teeth, problems that have increasing significance as populations age. Researchers have found fluoride ceases to be as effective with older people. That’s because the elderly have more difficulty generating the large amounts of saliva – loaded with calcium and phosphate - necessary to combine with fluoride to resist the demineralisation of teeth. Also, said Richard Bernholt, managing director of west London-based dental care company Periproducts: “The older you are the more likely you are to have gums receding and sensitivity problems because of what you eat.”
Periproducts, which sells Retardex products in the UK, has licensed NovaMin technology from a Florida firm of the same name and hopes to be the first company to have it formulated in a retail brand in the UK later this year. Periproducts plans to launch its new toothpaste in October at the British Dental Trade Association exhibition at NEC Birmingham. The company wants to get its as-yet-unnamed toothpaste with dentists and into the retail chain before the big names in oral hygiene – Colgate-Palmolive, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and Procter & Gamble reformulate their products with NovaMin or competing calcium phosphate compounds.

Source : Bahrain Tribune

Growing Bone : Scientists Succeed in Lab

It was one of the first medical observations: that human bone is one of the few tissues that can regrow after injury. Hippocrates knew it and hoped that somehow that power could be harnessed for healing.

Now, 2,400 years later, reports from commercial and university laboratories suggest that scientists have finally begun to do just that -- to grow bones and cartilage virtually at will.

''This is exciting because we are mimicking the natural process of development,'' said Dr. A. Hari Reddi, a professor of biology and orthopedics at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore who has worked on bone growth for more than 30 years. ''We are following the same steps that occur in the first weeks after conception.''

The success is one of several in the new field of tissue engineering, the growing of spare parts for the human body. The new power to grow human tissues and organs is a result of years of basic research followed by rapid progress in molecular biology and genetic engineering. Among the tissues now successfully grown, at least in the laboratory, are skin, bone, cartilage, liver, kidney and teeth. This has been made possible through the identification of substances that control different types of tissue growth.

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