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Humans may be able to grow new teeth within just 6 years. Japanese researchers are advancing a promising tooth-regrowing medicine into human trials. (www.popularmechanics.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Annoyingly there’s no English language link, so it’s hard to say. I’m not even clear on what they did with the ferrets.

Here you go! https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1798

A ferret got an extra tooth

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ah, thanks!

So the meat of this is actually the mouse models, looks like. Strains of mice with genetically missing teeth got them back.

They basically just juiced normal ferrets to see what would happen, and they grew an extra incisor as you can see in the images posted. I'm guessing developing genetically toothless ferrets wasn't in the scope of their funding. You can get all kinds of weird lab mice "off the shelf", though.