Abstract

Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, From and Beyond the Dentistry

Wenkai Jiang, Longxing Ni, Alastair Sloan and Bing Song

In the past decade, oral stem/progenitor cells have been proved to be a promising source for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, due to their multiple advantages of easy accessibility without invasive procedures and ethical issues, excellent proliferation and regeneration capacity, pluripotency of differentiation into multiple lineages, as well as little inherent immunogenicity. There are a variety of oral tissue derived stem/progenitor cells, including dental pulp stem cells (DPSCs), stem cells from exfoliated deciduous teeth/apical papilla/periodontal ligament, mesenchymal stem cells from gingiva, and progenitor cells from oral mucosal lamina propria (OMLP-PCs). This review outlines two major oral stem/progenitor cells ? DPSCs and OMLP-PCs, and showcases their potential in not only regenerative dentistry but also regenerative treatments for other systems and immunotherapies.