Abstract:

Tissue engineering has been growing up as one of the most important disciplines in health sciences with several applications in tissues and organs regeneration, including the generation of autologous functional tissues for the use in clinic on different fields, among others medicine, dentistry, veterinary, biology, etc. Due to tissue engineering is a relatively novel discipline few graduate school programs related to health have included in their curriculum a subject such as tissue engineering and more over programs related to dentistry specialties hadn’t included any formal field related to tissue engineering up to the present. In this context, it could be important that dentistry students enrolled at dentistry specialties graduate programs begin to develop their knowledge in regenerative dentistry and tissue engineering concepts. In order to know about dentistry graduate students knowledge related to tissue engineering concepts and their opinion about incorporating tissue engineering as a subject in the new curriculum, we asked in this work to fifty graduate students from endodontic and orthodontic dentistry graduate programs, (thirty and twenty students, respectively) fifteen questions related to tissue engineering teaching which included three main parts: the first one was related to tissue engineering definition, the second one was related to tissue engineering concepts including stem cells, tissue bank, cell culture, regenerative medicine, etc., and finally the last one was related to students’ personal opinion about the possibility to introduce tissue engineering as an optional or curricular subject in the new curriculum of graduate dentistry programs which students are enrolled in at the Faculty of Dentistry of the University of Michoacán (Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo). Our results showed that 54 per cent of students had a correct knowledge related to define tissue engineering, where 15 per cent knew widely tissue engineering concepts and 97 per cent would like to have tissue engineering as a part of their academic program. No statistical differences were not found between specialty groups. These results showed that even students’ hadn´t had a formal tissue engineering subject at postgraduate studies division centre, they perceived that this discipline is important due to the relation with the current treatment planning in orthodontic and endodontic specialties. By means of novel tools, molecular and growing factors used up to the moment showed in the literature, students may improve critical thinking to suggest novel ways for treatments related to tissue engineering and to clinical needs for each specialty. Also, graduate specialty thesis could be performed by a review format or an investigation experimental protocol, taking into account previous teaching on tissue engineering concepts.

Keywords:

Tissue engineering training, graduate dentistry programs, tissue engineering knowledge on health programs, dentistry clinic and tissue engineering.