Journal of Oral Tissue Engineering

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
 Study of Pluripotency and Activation of Totipotency in Human Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells

 Shunji IZAWA, Kozo YAMAJI, Tomohiro HOSHIKA, Yoshihiro NISHITANI and Masahiro YOSHIYAMA

Department of Operative Dentistry, Okayama University
Graduate School of Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Okayama, Japan
J Oral Tissue Engin 2012;10(2):95-103
SYNOPSIS
Tissue regeneration is the important issue in the field of operative dentistry. We demonstrated in series of studies that human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) can differentiate into odontblasts under the certain conditions (Izawa S et al., 2009). Mesenchymal stem cells can differentiate into multiple types of cells derived from mesenchyme (Liechty KW et al., 2000). At the same time odontblasts are primarily derived from mesenchyme; thus, we expected that mesenchymal stem cells can differentiate into odontblasts.
The results in series of our study indicated that TNFα is necessary for hMSCs to differentiate into odontblasts and suggest that TNFα activates potential totipotency of hMSCs and the activation can lead to the regeneration of target cells or tissues.

Key words: human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells, TNFα, pluripotency, totipotency