About 1 percent of the world population has Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD – It’s a spectrum of developmental disorders that affect people’s ability to interact and communicate with other people.

And it’s a challenge for scientists to study, too.

Take Jackson.

He’s a 6 year old that loves being outside and learning about dinosaurs, but he has trouble interacting and talking with other people.

He’s part of the one percent of people living with ASD.

But it’s tricky to know if and how the brains of kids with ASD are different from those without ASD.

Scientists can’t just open up our heads and take out the brain cells or neurons to study.

And that’s when neurobiologist Alysson Muotri enlisted the help of the tooth fairy.

Seriously.

Alysson asked parents to send him their children’s baby teeth… and ended up collecting over 300 teeth from all around the world, from kids with and without ASD.

But he didn’t trade them for money.

Let me fill you in... Alysson and his team removed the cells or dental pulp from the centers of the baby teeth.

He reprogrammed those cells to convert them back into stem cells… the type of cells the teeth grew from in the first place.

Since stem cells are the starting point for all the different cell types in your body, he added a cocktail of chemicals to trigger the stem cells to develop into neurons.

Now Alysson could compare the neurons from the two sets of children.

When he looked at the neurons made from teeth of kids with ASD, he noticed there were fewer synapses, the number connections between the neurons, than those from kids without ASD.

Synapses allow neurons to communicate so they can function together.

So when a particular drug was added to the neurons of a child with ASD, Alysson noticed more synapses started to grow.

Pretty cool, right?

This drug not only helped in the lab, it also helped improve the symptoms of ASD in real life.

When parents gave the child the drug for a month, some adults reported seeing improvements in his focus and social behavior.

Using this cell reprogramming technique, scientists learned how ASD can affect neurons and they developed a personalized treatment for one child.

But the many types of ASD can affect the neurons of many children in different ways.

Right now, scientists are using the neurons they have to identify and categorize the different underlying causes of ASD, so if another drug is discovered, it could treat many children.

And in the future, when it becomes more affordable, we could use this technique for personalized medicine.

A single baby tooth can provide a taste of what’s going on in a child’s brain and help scientists to better study and tailor treatments for ASD.

And that’s something to sink your teeth into!