Hiroaki Kodama knew little about dental and bone research when he became an assistant professor at Tohoku Dental University. What he did know was cell culture technology, and he recognized the field's need for a clonal cell line “which retains as far as possible a normal ability to differentiate into functional cells.”
In 1979, he and his colleagues started establishing cell lines that differentiated into osteoblasts (bone-forming cells) rather than odontoblasts (dentin-forming cells). At that time, only a few primary bone cell cultures had been reported to show hints of in vitro bone formation (Binderman et al., 1979; Nijiweide et al., 1982).
Kodama (RIKEN, Wako Saitama, Japan), says the secret to success was using the same cell culture method used to make the immortalized mouse fibroblast 3T3 cell line (Todaro and Green, 1963; see “A cell line that is under control” JCB 168:988). This meant...
