Phenotype-Independent Effects of Retroviral Transduction in Human Dental Pulp Stem Cells

An immortalized human dental pulp stem cell (DPSC) line of an odontoblastic phenotype is established to circumvent the normal programmed senescence and to maintain the cell line's usefulness as a tool for further study of cellular activity. DPSCs are isolated from human dental pulp tissues and transfected using hTERT. The influence of this process on the DPSC phenotype and the mRNA expression of oncogenes involved in cellular senescence is investigated. The results reveal an absence of altered DPSC morphology and phenotype following the exogenous introduction of the hTERT gene, which is coupled with a significant reduction in p16 mRNA expression. This provides insight into how to circumvent in vitro dental pulp stem cell death following the exogenous introduction of hTERT. The importance of the maintenance of cell viability and the development of human tissue-sourced stem cell lines is highlighted. A better understanding of in vitro responses of these specialized cells to changes in their tightly regulated microenvironments will allow the utilization of their full therapeutic potential in biomimetic constructs.