More Salivary Gland Engineering

Here is recent news of another team working to engineer salivary gland tissue, one of many parts of the body typically given little thought until it stops working. This team doesn't seem to be as close to a functional end result as the Japanese group I pointed out last month, but a diversity of approaches is always a good sign:

Saliva is critical to good health. It helps with speaking, swallowing, washing food off teeth, initial food digestion and preventing oral infections. Insufficient saliva can cause chronic bad breath, cavities, gum disease, as well as systemic infections. There is no treatment for low-producing or nonfunctioning salivary glands, and the glands have little regenerative capability.

A research team is the first to use silk fibers as a framework to grow stem cells into salivary gland cells. Silk is a good choice for stem cell scaffolding because it is natural, biodegradable, flexible and porous, providing the developing cells easy access to oxygen and nutrition. It also does not cause inflammation, as other scaffold materials have. The researchers' new process is the first major step toward helping more than 4 million people in the U.S. with a degenerative autoimmune disease called Sjögren's syndrome, in which the body attacks its own tear ducts and salivary glands. Low saliva production also is a devastating problem for thousands of patients who have had radiation treatment for head and neck cancer, as well as about 50 percent of older Americans whose ...

Source: Fight Aging! - July 28, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs