Tooth Bank System for Bone Regeneration - Safety Report

The use of auto-tooth bone grafts fabricated from patients' own extracted teeth has become possible due to the development of tooth banking procedures. The Korea Tooth Bank (KTB), established in Seoul in 2009, is one such tooth-banking facility that can procure and store teeth, and then process them into bone graft substitutes. Another is the Hospital Tooth Bank (HTB) at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital (SNUBH), established in 2010 for performing storage and grafting of auto-tooth bone grafts based on experimental and clinical research. Extracted teeth are sent to the above-mentioned facility units and then delivered back to the patients for clinical use, and thus the safety of the auto-tooth bone graft materials as well as the clinical effectiveness must be guaranteed through proper quality assurance (QA) procedures. For the purpose of this investigation, we analyzed written documents for QA at KTB, and we performed histopathologic and microbiologic examinations against the banked tooth materials at the HTB. The results suggest that the tooth banking systems at both KTB and HTB sufficiently ensure patient safety.