(CNN) – That may be a way off, but at King’s College London, Ana Angelova Volponi, director of the postgraduate program in regenerative dentistry, has been experimenting with lab-grown teeth for almost two decades, and was part of a team that in 2013 grew a tooth from human and mouse cells.

This year, she led a study that built upon that work and achieved a breakthrough in the material used to house the growing tooth in the lab, which better mimics the actual environment where biological teeth grow in the mouth. It’s a key step on the way to replacing the mouse cells with human cells and stimulating them to form a tooth. (Read More)