A stained section of a tooth organoid grown in the lab at King’s College London. Dr. Xuechen Zhang

It’s not surprising that many people fear the dentist. Replacing a tooth often requires invasive surgery and implanting a titanium screw into a patient’s jawbone, then waiting months for that to strengthen into an artificial root, before attaching a crown or cap on top of it.

But research groups around the world are working to find ways to implant or grow real biological teeth in a human jaw.

That may be a way off, but at King’s College London, Ana Angelova Volponi, director of the postgraduate program in regenerative dentistry, has been experimenting with lab-grown teeth for almost two decades, and was part of a team that in 2013 grew a tooth from human and mouse cells.

This year, sh

See Full Page