Could Baby Teeth Stem Cells Save Your Child?

To parents, it might sound like the best kind of health insurance -- a personal bank of stem cells, obtained from a baby tooth, that would be available for the taking should their child develop a life-threatening illness years down the road.

The catch: The therapies that would use these stem cells have not yet been developed. Stem cell experts say such advances are years or decades away -- if they ever come to pass.

And considering the cost of extracting and storing these stem cells -- an initial price tag of $590, plus an annual fee of $100 -- some experts say the slim chance that such stem cells would ever come in handy is not worth the expense.

Still, there are those that see potential. Grant Sadler is president of GMS Dental Centers in Houston, whose clinics began a collaboration last week with a Scottsdale, Ariz., company called StemSave that would offer parents the chance to bank the stem cells from their kids' extracted teeth.

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Sadler said that in the first week of its launch, parents who have brought their children to his offices have expressed a great deal of interest in the banking of their children's baby teeth stem cells.

"They have responded very positively," he said. "I announced it to the staff, and there were some parents who were waiting in the corner of the lobby. After I was done, two of them came up and said, 'Boy, we really want to do this today. Can we use this?'"

He said the banking of these cells could be especially appealing to parents who did not have the option of having their children's umbilical cord stem cells banked when they were born.

But Dr. Curt Civin, professor of cancer research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said the cells extracted from the pulp of baby teeth are quite different from those extracted from umbilical cords.

"The last time I saw this, the stem cells from baby teeth were mesenchymal," he said, adding that this layer forms such tissues as the cartilage, bone, fat and other "lining" cells.