This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Extreme dry mouth, caused by radiation used to treat cancer and by autoimmune diseases such as Sjögren's disease, radically affects quality of life for sufferers. It can hamper speaking, swallowing and eating, and for years has seemed an intractable problem.
Attempts to stimulate the salivary glands to produce more saliva or to create artificial saliva have been ineffective. Now, a small team of University at Buffalo researchers is working on a promising new strategy: creating salivary glands from human pluripotent stem cells (PSC) that could potentially be implanted into an individual's mouth. "Human pluripotent stem cells can be derived from easily accessible adult somatic cells, such as skin or blood cells, making them an attractive cell source for therapeutic applications," says Stelios Andreadis, Ph.D., SUNY distinguished professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo.
Andreadis is the co-principal investigator (PI) on the study that was published in Nature Communications. The co-PI is Olga Baker, Ph.D., D.D.S., a professor in the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia. Laura Sherwood, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering and a member of Andreadis' research group, was the first author on the paper, along with Ronel Samuel, who graduated with his Ph.D. in 2024.
Last year, Sherwood earned an award for her research on this topic, which she presented at the 2025 Salivary Glands and Exocrine Biology Gordon Research Conference. Andreadis explains that they are guiding these stem cells through steps that are similar to how salivary glands form during human development. They gradually produce salivary gland epithelial progenitor cells (SGEPs), which organize themselves into tiny, three-dimensional structures called organoids, or mini organs.
"Our findings suggest that salivary gland organoids may hold promise for studying salivary gland development, disease progression and drug screening, as well as for development of cell therapies for salivary gland regeneration," says Andreadis, who also serves as director of UB's Center of Cell, Gene and Tissue Engineering and is a member of the UB Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. In 2012, Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka and the late British biologist John Gurdon were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that mature human cells can be converted to pluripotent stem cells. These cells have the potential to become almost any type of cell in the body.
"These cells have since been used to create vascular cells, brain cells and kidney cells, but they have not yet been successful with the salivary glands," Andreadis says. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly. Baker's research team in Missouri transplanted the organoids into the submandibular salivary glands of immunodeficient mice, which allowed the human-derived tissue to be studied without immune rejection.
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