Periodontal disease is a most serious oral disease developed in all age group of the whole world, and the object of the healing is a regeneration of the damage of tissues such as alveolar bone, periodontal ligament, cementum. Recently the bone graft ...
Periodontal disease is a most serious oral disease developed in all age group of the whole world, and the object of the healing is a regeneration of the damage of tissues such as alveolar bone, periodontal ligament, cementum. Recently the bone graft and guided tissue regeneration (GTR) have been used for the reconstruction of periodontal tissues. I progressed this study using tissue engineering for regeneration of the alveolar bone and periodontal ligament. A lot of studies using periodontal ligament cells (PDLCs) have been reported, but dental pulp stem cells (DPSCs) that have less possibility of contamination at the primary culture is considered as a good cell source more and more, so I used DPSCs in this study.
DPSCs from the tooth are adult stem cells which can differentiate into various cells at the specialization environment. It may include scaffolds providing the extracellular matrix, and special differentiation medium containing growth factors, cytokines and appropriate mechanical stimulation to differentiate DPSCs into the cells of another tissue.
Also, a lot of DPSCs are necessary to be used in cell therapy, so the cells must be tremendously expanded in a short time. Therefore, I used some growth factors to promote proliferation of DPSCs, but lineage-specific differentiation condition is strongly necessary because of their multi-differentiation capacity into another cells such as osteoblast, chondrocyte, adipocyte during culture. So, I used basal medium (α-MEM) to proliferate DPSCs and made a osteogenic differentiation medium which consists of the basal medium and supplements, dexamethasone, β-glycerophosphate, and ascorbic acid to differentiate into osteoblasts.
Also, chemical factors and mechanical factors play an important role in cell proliferation or differentiation. Therefore, I considered not only chemical factors but also mechanical factors to differentiate DPSCs into osteoblasts.
In this study I tried to find the effect of mechanical stimulus on the differentiation of DPSCs into osteoblasts using a cell training bioreactor and flexwell system imposing cyclic mechanical strain whose parameters were 0.03 Hz, 5%, 8% strain or 0.2 Hz, 10% strain. As a result, DPSCs under cyclic strain showed more regularly oriented alignment and lower expression of CD90 and CD105 than control by microscopy and FACS analysis. In transcriptional level, type I collagen, type Ⅲ collagen, bone sialoprotein, osteocalcin, osteonectin, osteoprotegerin mRNA expressions of DPSCs under cyclic strain were higher than those of control. In that, it is thought that mechanical cyclic strain induced the loss of stemness of DPSCs, therefore improved the differentiation into osteoblasts..
In the experiment using scaffold, I made bio-scaffolds that can improve the differentiation into alveolar bone using BMP-2, hyaluronic acid and hydroxyapatite.
As a result, it is found that the bio-scaffold containing three components at appropriate concentration was superior to the other bio-scaffolds in alveolar bone regeneration.
In conclusion, DPSCs under optimal growth factors/cytokines and mechanical stimulation could differentiate into osteoblasts and also these cells with special bio-scaffold could reconstruct alveolar bone in vitro and in vivo. In the future, DPSCs and the bio-scaffold will be useful in the alveolar bone regeneration as well as ligament regeneration.