Missing Teeth? Maybe Not For Long…
Given the Canadian hockey obsession (and the resulting missing teeth), it's probably not surprising that an idea like this one would come out of the University of Alberta: it's a chip, attached to an orthodontic brace or removable crown, that sits in the mouth at the site of the broken/missing tooth and stimulates the jaw to grow the tooth's root back with low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS). Apparently once the root regrows, it can regrow the tooth and the patient will have a full, healthy set of choppers again instead of a bunch of hardware. Tarak El-Bialy and Jie Chen, the researchers who developed the technology, have filed a US patent for a miniaturized version of the gadget that could be in dentists offices in the next few years. In the future, they hope, with more development, the same technology might even be used to regrow bone.
