UCLA

Direct pulp tissue grafting has been proposed in the past to void the tedious task of laboratory culturing. Migration of cells from dental pulp tissue explantation have shown multi differentiation potential in vitro like DPSC. These cells were named MP-MSC (minced pulp derived mesenchymal stem cells) by our group. Establishing that intact pulp tissue can be a potential source of dental pulp derived stem cells, we further wanted to investigate the possibility of pulp tissue banking. Cord tissue banking has gained popularity and success in the past decade and has shown successful in medicine. Out study demonstrated that cryopreserved pulp tissue has a potential to sustain viable cells and these cells additionally showed that they can maintain the multi potent differentiation in vitro like unfrozen tissue as well as expression of odontogenic marker. Additionally, our data also suggests that the perivascular niche can be maintained intact in the minced pulp tissue as well as frozen minced pulp tissue, suggesting the mesenchymal origin of the cells. Ex vivo tissue engineering showed migration of cells and attachment to dentin surface in presence of scaffold from frozen tissue is similar to unfrozen tissue. Additionally, RT-PCR data from our study shows that frozen pulp tissue derived cells showed differentiation and expression of ALP, OCN, DSPP markers suggesting that they maintained the differentiation potential after cryopreservation.