Now, bank your child's teeth

BANGALORE: When his six year-old son’s tooth was about to fall off, Rachit Saxena, a banking sector consultant in Bangalore, chose to put it in a dental stem cell bank. “He would lose the tooth anyway, so I thought of putting it to good use,” Saxena said.
Dental stem cell banking, a relatively new concept, is beginning to take off in India. While umbilical cord blood banking is over a decade old, dental pulp banking debuted just a year ago.Two Mumbai-based companies — Stemade Biotech and Store Your Cells — are offering the services of cryo-preserving (storing at low temperatures) dental pulp. Stemade Biotech recently opened its teeth collection centres in Bangalore, Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. Store Your Cells operates through dentists.
Once a tooth is extracted, it is kept in a tooth collection kit and sent to the lab for cryo-preserving. Children’s milk teeth can be preserved. Adults, too, have an option of storing their wisdom teeth for stem cell applications.
“I have only one daughter. I want to provide her the best in life, including bio-insurance,” said Dr Shailaja Prasad, a dentist who has banked her 10-year-old daughter’s tooth.
Stem cell treatment is a strategy that introduces new cells into damaged tissue in order to treat disease or injury. “Recently, the AIIMS commenced studies to show the efficacy of dental stem cells to grow into heart cells. Global studies point towards the future possibility of treating an array of diseases and injuries such as cancer, cardiac diseases, Parkinson’s disease, using stem cells,” Shailesh Gadre, founder and MD of Stemade Biotech, said.
Researchers are hopeful that new teeth can be grown using a person’s own dental stem cells. Studies are in progress to put dental stem cells to cosmetic applications such as growing hair.