Department of Ophthalmology, Wellstar MCG Health, 1120 15th Street, Augusta, GA, 30912, USA.
Department of Ophthalmology, Charlie Norwood Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 950 15th Street, Augusta, GA, 30901, USA.
BMC Oral Health. 2024 Sep 27;24(1):1141. doi: 10.1186/s12903-024-04884-5.
Limited treatment options exist for damaged nerves and despite impressive advances in tissue engineering, scientists and clinicians have yet to fully replicate nerve development and recruitment. Innervation is a critical feature for normal organ function. While most organs are innervated prior to birth, a rare example of postnatal nerve recruitment occurs in the natural development of secondary teeth during adolescence. Many animals undergo postnatal shedding of deciduous teeth with development and eruption of secondary teeth, a process requiring recruitment of nerve and vasculature to each tooth pulp for viability. Here, the investigators created a novel model for the study of postnatal innervation by exploiting the natural phenomenon of tooth-driven nerve recruitment.
The investigators theorized that developing teeth possess a special capacity to induce innervation which could be harnessed in a clinical setting for nerve regeneration, and hyptothesized that a transplant model could be created to capture this phenomenon. In this descriptive study, a rat model of autologous tooth transplantation and de novo nerve recruitment was developed by surgically transferring whole developing molars to the autologous tibia.
Downstream histological analysis performed 6 to 14 weeks after surgery demonstrated integration of molar into tibia in 81% of postoperative rats, with progressive pulpal expression of nerve marker ß-tubulin III suggestive of neuronal recruitment.
These findings provide a novel model for the study of organ transplantation and support the theory that developing dental tissues may retain nerve-inductive properties postnatally.
受损神经的治疗选择有限，尽管组织工程学取得了令人瞩目的进展，但科学家和临床医生尚未完全复制神经发育和募集。神经支配是正常器官功能的关键特征。虽然大多数器官在出生前就被支配，但在青少年时期第二颗牙齿的自然发育过程中，存在一种罕见的后天神经募集的例子。许多动物在乳齿脱落和第二颗牙齿发育和萌出的过程中经历后天的乳齿脱落，这个过程需要神经和血管向每个牙髓募集以保持其存活。在这里，研究人员通过利用牙齿驱动神经募集的自然现象，创建了一个研究后天神经支配的新模型。
研究人员推测，发育中的牙齿具有特殊的诱导神经支配的能力，可以在临床环境中用于神经再生，并假设可以创建一种移植模型来捕获这种现象。在这项描述性研究中，研究人员通过将整个发育中的磨牙手术转移到自体胫骨上，建立了一种自体牙移植和新神经募集的大鼠模型。
术后 6 至 14 周进行的下游组织学分析显示，81%的术后大鼠的磨牙成功整合到胫骨中，神经标记物 β-微管蛋白 III 在牙髓中的渐进性表达提示神经元募集。
这些发现为器官移植的研究提供了一个新的模型，并支持了这样一种理论，即发育中的牙齿组织在出生后可能保留神经诱导特性。
