Cell Culture in the Biological Evaluation of Dental Materials: A Review

Abstract

Systematic research on dental materials began after World War I. For a long time the research was focused on the physical properties of the materials, and papers dealing with biological aspects were scarce. By the late 1950s a growing interest in biological responses to dental materials developed, and from the 1970s biological and physical evaluations were deemed equally important (1). Mammalian cells have been maintained in vitro since the early years of this century, but the use of cultured cells to evaluate the effects of chemicals and drugs is a more recent occurrence. The first practical application of this technique was in pharmacological investigations (2), but applications in other fields soon followed, and in 1955 the first studies were reported where a cell culture technique had been applied to the biological evaluation of dental materials (3,4). Since then the use of cell culture systems in dental materials research has grown rapidly. The main application has been for the assessment of cytotoxic effects, and the purpose of this paper is to review different test methods and discuss some facets of the problems posed by the cytotoxicity testing of dental materials.