What the review covers
Gould, Ratnayake and Cooper, writing in the journal Biologics on 24 July 2026, frame tooth regeneration as a shift in the dental paradigm from removal to repair to regeneration. The clinical motivation is stated plainly: dental disease and tooth loss from periodontitis, caries or trauma affect most adults at some point in their lives. The review is a narrative one, organised around the classic tissue engineering triad of cells, scaffolds and bioactive molecules, and it sets out to contrast the two strategic families that dominate the literature.
The two strategies
The first is cell transplantation, which the authors describe as the predominant approach. A full array of cell sources has been trialled for endodontic regeneration, and several reports have documented dental pulp-like tissue regeneration, either in vitro or following transplantation of stem cells. The second is cell homing, which aims instead to achieve repair and regeneration of the injury site through chemotaxis of host endogenous cells: no cells are transplanted, the scaffold and its signals recruit the patient’s own. The review explores what it calls therapeutically viable approaches by contrasting these two, with attention on the cell, scaffold and bioactive molecule combination each requires.
What it means for the tracked routes
Read against this site’s programme map, nearly everything the abstract describes as therapeutically viable sits inside an existing tooth: endodontic regeneration of pulp-like tissue. That is the pulp-dentin-repair route, tier 3, the one programme with controlled human data behind it (the autologous pulp stem cell trial recorded in our ledger on 22 August 2018; see /ledger/). Cell homing is a serious strategy in that same space, because it removes the cell manufacturing step that makes transplantation hard to deliver in a dental surgery. Whole-tooth replacement is not what this review measures.
Evidence level
A narrative review produces no new data and no pooled analysis. The findings it assembles range from T1 in vitro work to T3 human graft data assembled elsewhere; the review itself moves no tier, per the ladder at /method/.
Where we differ from the coverage
Triad reviews are often summarised as if regenerating teeth were now an engineering problem awaiting scale-up. The abstract’s own claim is narrower: it explores therapeutically viable approaches and contrasts two strategies, and the successes it cites are pulp-like tissue, in vitro or after transplantation. Pulp-like tissue in a canal is not a regenerated tooth, and the review does not claim one.
Provenance: every claim above traces to the paper’s published abstract, per our method at /method/.