At this week’s Greater New York Dental Meeting, Jeremy Mao, DDS, PhD, will discuss the medical applications of dental stem cells and how dentists can incorporate this groundbreaking discovery into their practices.

The lecture will take place Wednesday, December 3, at 11:45 am in Room 2 of the Exhibit Floor at the Jacob K Javits Center in New York.
 
According to Mao, dentists are now in the position of being able to help patients preserve their own stem cells. Instead of discarding a patient’s tooth during a routine medical procedure, a new technology allows dentists to preserve these teeth so patients can bank their stem cells.
 
Mao, one of the leading stem cell researchers in the world, will discuss his latest scientific findings and why dentists should expand their practice to incorporate the recovery and cryo-preservation of dental stem cells on behalf of their patients.

Recovering and cryopreserving dental stem cells gives people the opportunity to benefit from future regenerative services and medical technology. And it gives dentists the opportunity to expand their practice while providing a potentially life-saving service to their patients.
 
It is only in the past decade that researchers at the National Institutes of Health discovered stem cells within teeth have the ability to grow into a wide range of cells and tissues. This discovery has opened the door to tremendous medical applications, as these stem cells could be used to treat Parkinson’s disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injury, and arthritis to diabetes, infertility, osteoporosis, and brain trauma.

Mao is an oral surgeon and the director of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Laboratory (TERML) at Columbia University, as well as a professor of dental medicine and biomedical engineering at the university. He serves on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including Tissue Engineering and the Journal of Biomedical Material Research, and has served on the editorial boards of Stem Cells and Development, Medical Engineering and Physics, and Frontiers of Bioscience. Mao holds numerous patents in the areas of stem cells, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine, and is a standing member of the Musculoskeletal Tissue Engineering Study Section of the NIH.