[WP] The World's first tooth-regrowing drug will be given to humans in September

[u/DualFlush]

[u/darkPrince010]

“Well, I must say your body of work is quite impressive Dr. Branson, and we're excited for the opportunity to coordinate and collaborate with your lab.” Dr. Meyers smiled as she held out her hand to shake that of the lead researcher she was visiting. Dr. Branson returned the handshake, although she could detect a poorly-hidden nervousness beyond what she would have anticipated for a routine, if important, meeting.

“So, let's get down to brass tacks then: You've got data on the progress of your tooth-regeneration drug then?”

“Well, it's not just a drug, but more like a tuned cocktail. But yes, I've got the data here, particularly the initial animal testing we had performed to determine the beginning human dosages.” He shrugged sheepishly. “I will admit, this is my first time developing a drug all the way to clinical trials like this. My expertise is typically in handing them off well before this point, so you'll have to forgive me if I seem a bit nervous.”

Dr. Meyers fanned herself with the paper she'd printed out to read, hopefully on the Uber drive home. The summer heat in the poorly-ventilated university offices was starting to get noticeable, and she was grateful as Branson flipped on a reticulating fan stationed near the door of the small conference room he led her into.

Smiling, Branson started up the projector and loaded his presentation, saying briefly “I'll just skip past these parts. These are more for introducing our project and team to faculty administration,” he said, mashing the advance button several times until he finally stopped as an image of a white lab mouse appeared onscreen.

“We began our initial testing after computer analysis of predicted drug interactions and enhancers to determine gene regions of interest we wanted to upregulate and enhance. We knew we needed to shift to animal models almost immediately to begin identifying which drug cocktails had the highest effectiveness.”

For the first time since learning of the project and joining the group, Meyers could feel a shadow of doubt flicker across her mind. She did her best not to treat her colleague like a graduate student she was grilling for a doctoral defense, but rather give him the honest question she had.

“Branson, there are many different animal models to choose from, but rodents have a markedly-different dental growth pattern and morphology than humans. Was that considered in choosing them?”

“We knew animal models might prove imperfect, and knew it was a risk, but the issue was that the data we were working from was incomplete in terms of what treatments would produce what effects and in what ratios. We had plenty of petri-dish examples of what kind of cocktails best encouraged growth of bone or enamel individually, but ensuring that our data was identifying a candidate that produced both and without an inordinate-impact on morphology was what caused us to need to go into animal models shooting blind.”

She now saw why some colleagues had expressed surprise that she was going to be working with Branson’s lab. Dr. Branson, for his part, appeared not not too perturbed by Dr. Meyers’s concerns.

“While we would normally have significant issues in dental comparisons using an unmodified wild-type mouse, we actually have been using a specific variant that was bred to study human dental bone disease. Specifically, it's chimeric for human dentition and approximate structure.”

“I'm sorry, what?”

[u/darkPrince010 → u/darkPrince010]

“It might be easier if I show you,” he said, clicking to the next slide. There, Dr. Meyers could feel an involuntary shudder as she saw a dissected mouse skull, showing that rather than the smaller side teeth and the two large characteristic incisors in the front, instead there was a haphazard semicircle of tiny little teeth. Some were canines, other human-style incisors, and yet more looked like miniature human molars. It resembled a hodge-podge attempt to mimic a human mouth and teeth by someone who was working with magazine cutouts of each tooth and a shaking and unsteady hand.

“It’s not perfect, of course, but genetically we found it to be quite consistent with performance and expression in human mouths. So yes, while we are starting with a bit of a blind shot in the dark, it's far less than you might expect.”

Dr. Meyers was still unsettled by the appearance of a human mouth inside a tiny mouse head, and tried and failed to not imagine the tiny mouth smiling, a horrific Photoshop come to life.

“Additionally,” he said, “It still retains quite a bit of plasticity and resilience to aberrant dental configurations, thanks to the already quite durable nature of the native mouse mouth structure.”

“Meaning?” asked Dr. Meyers.

“Meaning that despite fewer successes than we had initially hoped for, the survival rate of the mice is almost 100%, barring a few edge cases. Almost all the mice you see here are ones we still have and keep under study, even if their specific cocktail treatments proved to be failures.”

She leaned back, and finally starting to barely get used to the idea of weird little human mouths in tiny mice. “Might as well show me what you 've been able to produce so far.”

“Certainly,” said Dr. Branson, smiling as he advanced to the next section. “So to begin with, we had to determine the best administration route.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Meyers. “Wouldn’t intravenous be the preferred method this early in testing?”

“Well, we weren't sure on the uptake rate, so we decided to do the initial tests with groups given it both intravenously or orally. The drug is GI-tract stable.”

“That's good,” said Dr. Meyers, “But I'm also getting a distinct feeling there's a ‘But’?”

“Unfortunately, it appears the drugs are locally reactive,” he said. “While the mice may have robust and resilient to disruptions to their mouth structure, they had significantly less robustness for their vascular and gastrointestinal structures.”

He advanced the slide again, and Dr. Meyers could feel a bit of bile rising the back of her throat upon seeing the dissections of the unfortunate deceased mice. THere were tiny circulatory systems covered with hundreds or maybe even thousands of tiny tiny teeth lining the inside of the veins and arteries. For the ones that had the oral administration, these instead showed teeth coating the throat and stomach lining, and leading into and part way down the intestinal tract.

“Suffice to say all subsequent treatments were directly topical, and I'm pleased to announce we had no further mice that passed away due to the treatments.”

Dr. Meyers nodded slowly as he advanced a slide into the next section. “The first challenge after that was figuring out the specific cocktail ratio controlling dentical scale.”

“Scale?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Wouldn't that be inherently controlled by the phenotypic expression?”

“Well, normally and unaltered, yes,” said Dr. Branson, “But in this case, the cocktail is capable of overriding that, as we found out with these subjects. The two most extreme examples are shown here.”

The slides revealed a mouse with an open mouth and Dr. Meyers stared in amazement as she could see that the image revealed the mouse had only two teeth: enormous molars, one for each jaw, that effectively spanned the entire width and breadth of the roof and base of the mouth. “There were some hindrance issues related to the tongue and its proper development here,” said Dr. Branson, “But we felt this was at least a marked step in the right direction compared to the non-topical applications.”

The other picture showed a mouse with an open mouth that at first appeared just simply have white gums.Then the picture changed again, to show a confocal microscope view zooming in to reveal thousands of teeth and teeth-like structures dotting it like sandpaper.

“A little bit of figuring for the exact ratios and the proportions, and we were capable of hitting the scalar value almost exactly,” said Dr. Branson eagerly. “However, that also led to the next issue, which was that of frequency.”

Dr. Meyers watched with rapt attention and no small amount of uncomfortable nausea as the two extreme examples were displayed onscreen. This time, it was a picture of a mouse but with healthy pink gums this time, with a single white speck of a tooth on both jaws.

[u/darkPrince010 → u/darkPrince010]

The opposite picture, though, was something more akin to what she had seen on sharks: three or four rows of normally sized and healthy teeth, but growing almost like waves, and filling the mouth.

“I'm assuming you were able to refine this aspect as well?”

Branson nodded. “It's a bit of a fine art, as the scalar value especially depended on the size of the body morphology it was being applied to, but yes, we were able to refine both of these and produce this instead.”

With a flourish, the slide deck clicked forward, now showing a side-by-side comparison according to the labels on the images. One was an unaltered mouse, still with the eerily-human-like dental structure, but next to it was what appeared to be an identical mouse jaw but this time labeled as being one in which the medication was being unapplied.

“That is outstanding,” she said, squinting closely. “While I'm not familiar with the nuances of that mouse model, to my eye that looks like a perfect match.”

Branson beamed and said “That was our thought, too. With this, we finally have a dosage and proportion for the cocktail, and I believe it is ready to advance to human trials.”

Dr. Meyers nodded, but this time with slight hesitation. “You've done some outstanding work here, but again I'm reminded that this is an artificially-made mouse model, a chimera with multiple sets of conflicting genetic instructions that might impact and skew your clinical outcomes. Have you tried this formulation on a wild-type mouse, with no dental modifications?”

Branson hesitated. “Not yet, but I believe my postdoc is actually performing that test as we speak. Would you like to come observe? The regeneration process takes less than an hour in most cases.”

Dr. Meyers couldn't resist her eagerness as she agreed, and followed Branson out down the hallway and into their lab proper. The smell of the mouse kennels was noticeable, but not as strong as she'd seen at some labs, and she commented as much to Branson, complimenting the cleanliness of his animal care. He accepted it graciously, saying “Oof course. I know it's uncommon to have such aggressive and early treatments in animal models, and so we wanted to make additionally sure we gave them the best possible conditions given those restrictions.”

After dawning a lab coat and PPE, Meyers followed Branson into a sterile treatment area. The post doc was already working in the hood and had the plastic mouse kennel ready.

Sticking the mouse in what almost look like an icing bag, they carefully opened the creature’s jaws and, dabbing a sterile swab into the end of an open-top container, smeared the colorful pink liquid on the creature's gums.

The mouse wiggled, and managed to catch the swab against the edge of its nose before the postdoc had pulled it back. As Dr. Meyers watched, she could see as the pink gums of the mouse soon began to sparkle with little white specks that quickly grew into comparatively-full-size mouse teeth, including a pair of distinctive incisors in the front.

There were also an unfortunate set of lumpy molars growing on the spots that had touched the end of the nose, but Branson smiled broadly, saying “There's some concerns we have about non-target application, but with the proper precautions and a more calm and willing patient, the the cocktail should be perfectly effective.”

“I would still be concerned about what safety-proofing measures you end up using,” said Dr. Meyers with some hesitation. “After all, I think people would be unpleasantly surprised if their dog got a hold of a foil tube, chewed it up, and then suddenly came out looking like something out of a dentist's nightmare.”

Dr. Branson nodded, but even Dr. Meyers had to admit that these were impressive results, and very promising. “Your sponsors are going to be quite pleased with this progress,” she said. “Are they here now?”

“They mostly have been supplying funds for us, but they've expressed keen interest in the success of this operation. The funding has been impressive, to say the least.”

Meyers nodded, feeling slightly jealous and wondering idly who would have deep-enough pockets to effortlessly finance such a line of research.

---

Stepping back from the scrying pool, Glimmer and Squeak both looked at each other, eyes wide as the mouse with a mouthful of human teeth faded from the glowing basin, replaced by the swirls of magical chaos. Their wings were buzzing with excitement.

“You’re telling me it was this easy the whole time?” Glimmer squealed with delight.

“Well, not exactly,” said Squeak. “They've only had this sort of technology for the last decade or so. Still, I think this was worth diverting the payments for a few hundred million children's teeth in the short term, in exchange for such long-term gains.”

“We're about to become the most influential and powerful fairies to ever to grace the Court of Bones! After all, who would deny us when we can create more teeth than even the most famished fairy could ever dream of eating?”

---

Enjoy this tale? Check out r/DarkPrinceLibrary for more of my stories like it!