The fractured teeth finally gave way after 3 years of quite uncomfortable experience, so I had to search for option to restore it.
It turned out that modern dentistry doesn’t have much modern to offer. Don’t get me wrong, new materials and techniques appear every year, but the cutting edge of today’s dental restoration – teeth implants – date back to 1980’s. Making them 30 years old. In fact, you have only two options for teeth beyond normal filling repair: tooth inlay and implant. The first one is metal drilled into the remains of damaged tooth, if the roots are still good enough, and the latter is metal bolt drilled into the jaw bone, if the tooth is missing or is too fragile to support chewing load. A prosthesis in its most primitive shape.
But there is some light at the end of the tunnel. In 2002 UK scientists managed to regrow week, but their own missing teeth in rats, and Dr Pamela Yelick prophesied cloned teeth to become as common as dental fillings in 10 years. Well, 10 years has passed, and cloned teeth are nowhere to be seen.
In 2007, Takashi Tsuji and his team from Tokyo University of Science managed to regrow teeth in mice, using teeth cells from embryos.
In 2009, the same group of scientists from Japan succeeded in regrowing teeth in mice from stem cells.
All this is great, but as I have to replace the tooth now, I’ll get an inlay. It should last at least 5 years, hopefully teeth regeneration will be common place those days, even though scientists now declare 2025 the year of mass teeth cloning.