Saving your Wisdom Teeth

Posted on 29. Aug, 2008 by wisdom in Wisdom Teeth

As mentioned in a previous post, it has been revealed that scientists in Japan were able to successfully harvest stem cells from wisdom teeth. This has several implications for patients.

The first one being that if you have your wisdom teeth removed, it might be wise to save them, or have someone save them for you. This is because in your lifetime it is possible that the stem cells harvested from the wisdom teeth could be of great importance to you. They could possibly cure diseases and other health problems you may have in the future.

What needs to be determined now is the best way to isolate and save the cells. It is not clear from the research from the scientists in Japan whether or not removing the wisdom teeth in certain ways can make it more difficult to harvest potential stem cells. This also should be determined.

It is unlikely that oral surgeons have large storage facilities where they can save all of these cells. Further, it is possible the cells could get mixed up. Saving them in your own home might not be the best idea either. Therefore I wonder what the best way to save these cells would be. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

Animals Have Room for Wisdom Teeth An article recently posted by Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/do-animals-have-wisdom-teeth...
Wisdom Teeth in the News Here are a few brief highlights of articles...

5 Comments

Noman

04. Sep, 2008

Since I read it the first time on your home page.. that we should store our wisdom teeth for they might have stem cells.. I have been wondering the same thing.. how would we store ém.. I havn’t hadmy wisdom teeth extracted yet but my teeth are kina crooked and I’ve bin thinking of getting some of my wisdom teeth removed.. I was set on having them removed, thinking that it might help to straighten my teeth, but after having gone through your site and reading the stories.. I think I’d rather prefer having crooked teeth than having pounding headches 24/7 for up to 12 years. Though I still havn’t completly let go of the idea of having my wisdom teeth removed yet.. but then I think.. where would I store them if i DO have them removed.. ice? some kina air-tight vaccuum? becuase right now they’re safely stored in my mouth

Cory from Dental Heroes

04. Sep, 2008

You bring up a great point, Wisdom. I didn’t cover the storage aspect of the discovery in my post last week, so I’ll be interested to see your readers’ suggestions.

wisdom

05. Sep, 2008

Well I was thinking about this last night and I think a good way to store wisdom teeth so you can potentially use the stem cells later in life would be to have a separate refrigerator either in your basement or garage (if you have the room). You would probably want to store them in some sort of an air tight container in the refrigerator and make sure that this refrigerator is not used for other uses.

If the refrigerator idea does not work then maybe store them in the freezer, although I am not so sure what the right temperature needs to be for the cells to stay alive for awhile.

Gregory Chotkowski, DMD

05. Jan, 2009

StemSave, Inc is a collaborative effort between stem cell researchers and the dental community to provide families, individuals and stem cell researchers a cost effective, non-invasive methodology for the recovery and cryopreservation of powerful and valuable Adult Stem Cells residing within baby teeth, wisdom teeth, permanent teeth and other oral tissues for future use in personalized medicine and regenerative medical therapies. For more information, visit http://www.StemSave.com.

Gregory Chotkowski, DMDs last blog post..StemSave president Dr. Greg Chotkowski discusses stem cells, regenerative medicine and the recovery and cryo-preservation of stem cells found in teeth on morning talk show