ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: As a special source of stem cells, dental pulp stem cells (DPSCs) make much progress in the development of tissue engineering field due to their high proliferation and self-renewal ability. In the certain conditions DPSCs can be induced to differentiate into a variety of specialized tissue cells, providing a new way for tissue engineering development. OBJECTIVE: To review the main progress in the DPSCs biological characteristics, original source, isolation method, and its related application in tissue engineering research. METHODS: "Dental pulp stem cell, differentiation, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering" in English and Chinese were termed as the keywords to search relevant articles about DPSCs and tissue engineering published from 2005 to 2017 in PubMed, Medline, WanFang, and CNKI databases. After removal of repetitive or irrelevant articles, 66 articles were finally reviewed. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: With the development of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, the effective combination of DPSCs and tissue engineering scaffolds have be further achieved. Recent studies on DPSCs focus on the properties of DPSCs differentiating into odontoblasts and osteocytes/osteoblasts and on the potential of nerve repair, vascular remodeling, corneal reconstruction and chondrogenic differentiation.