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Connecting oral-health science to broader biological research is a mission in which Christopher Nosrat, DDS, Ph.D., is encouraged to have more minds joining him.

The University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s newest research star says the National Institutes of Health is paying more attention to the role of oral health as part of overall wellbeing. In his case, the NIH is backing up that view with several funded and pending grants, including those which link oral-health science to seemingly unrelated problems like Parkinson’s disease.

“Just as advanced gum disease can be related to some heart problems, we now know that dentists cannot just be working with the teeth, but need instead to look at the mouth in relation to the whole of a person,” Nosrat said.

“The goal of dental research today is not just to develop good toothbrushes and tooth-filling material, but rather to expand our basic understanding of the human body.”

Nosrat joined the UT Health Science Center in the fall of 2006 as a professor in the Department of Restorative Dentistry and director of basic science in the College of Dentistry. He also has a joint appointment in the College of Medicine as a professor of anatomy and neurobiology.

Nosrat was recruited to Memphis from the University of Michigan, jump-starting the goal of former dean Russell Gilpatrick, DDS, to create a signature research program within the College of Dentistry.

Since then, it’s taken Nosrat more than a year to outfit and fully staff his new lab, which is housed in the school’s new Cancer Research Building.

“When you move, you always have to take into consideration that it’s not going to be the same as it was in your old lab,” he said. “It takes a while to get all the equipment, to get people and train them to do the work you intend for them to do.”

Today, Nosrat’s international team of five researchers has begun producing data, receiving new funding and collaborating with other scientists.

The lab’s position within the Cancer Research Building has offered the opportunity for Nosrat to begin a new project exploring the cause of oral cancers, and trying to determine whether there is a specific oral-cancer stem cell influencing those genetic mutations.

That effort, however, took a blow this spring with the sudden death of a postdoctoral research associate, Arun Bajpai, whose work had helped the project get off the ground.

In addition to his newer projects, Nosrat is continuing to focus on the area of dental-pulp stem cells, in which he’s worked for nearly a decade.

With his background in dentistry, Nosrat has long had an interest in how teeth grow, become innervated and connect to the brain. Working with a family of proteins important to establishing this connection, he learned that the molecules found in developing teeth are in the same family as those in other parts of the body’s nervous system. That led to the question of whether dental-pulp cells might be used in the treatment of, for example, spinal-cord injuries.

Further studies in animal models showed that cells from teeth grown in culture could be used to protect nerve cells from the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

From there, Nosrat envisions even an elderly Parkinson’s patient someday being able to draw treatment from the remaining stem-cell properties in a root of his or her surviving tooth.

“My hope is that some day you can go to a dentist and, in a procedure like a root canal, have these cells removed from your tooth,” he said. “We could grow them in culture, get the appropriate cells and use them to treat this disease.”

Although such applications in humans are still at least a decade or two away, Nosrat has been encouraged to see the notion go from outlandish to plausible in just a few short years.

“When we and a couple of other groups first start working on these cells, the common opinion was pretty negative,” he said. “‘You want to use tooth cells and put them in the brain?’”

A few years later, though, some companies have already sprung up to offer the service of freezing children’s baby teeth to harvest those cells later. Although Nosrat dismisses those sales efforts as “hype,” they do show how the potential value of dental-pulp stem cells is becoming more accepted, he said.

In addition to stem-cell research, Nosrat is also continuing work in the area of taste-bud development. In a project being pursued by his wife and lab mate, Irina Nosrat, the creation of transgenic “supertaster” mice is aimed at finding ways to regenerate taste buds after injury.

The Nosrats have been working together since the beginning of his research career. They met while in dental school together at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

Christopher Nosrat, a native of Iran, escaped from his home country as a teenager with backpack on his shoulders, never to return. After a year in Pakistan, he immigrated to Sweden, where he began learning the language and was able to begin dental studies.

He practiced dentistry for a few years after graduation, but found research was his greater passion. After receiving a Ph.D. and completing a post-doctoral research appointment at the Karolinska Institutet, he joined the University of Michigan in 1999.

He and his wife have two children, Philip, 14, and Stephan, 11.



June 2008

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