Hospitals, Pharma

Researchers have grown the first contracting human skeletal muscle

Growing contracting human muscles that responds to stimuli like real tissue sounds more like science […]

Growing contracting human muscles that responds to stimuli like real tissue sounds more like science fiction than modern science. But it has officially been done, and this could mean a whole new world for testing pharmaceuticals and studying diseases.

A new study out of Duke University led by Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke, and Lauran Madden, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac’s laboratory, has led to the creation of human skeletal muscle responds to electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.

“The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish,” said Bursac. “We are working to test drugs’ efficacy and safety without jeopardizing a patient’s health and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseases — especially rare ones and those that make taking muscle biopsies difficult.”

Madden and Bursac took a sample of human cells that had progressed beyond stem cells and expanded the “myogenic precursors” by more than a 1000-fold. Muscle fibers aligned and began functioning once they were put into 3D scaffolding with a nourishing gel.

“We have a lot of experience making bioartifical muscles from animal cells in the laboratory, and it still took us a year of adjusting variables like cell and gel density and optimizing the culture matrix and media to make this work with human muscle cells,” said Madden.

The muscles the researchers created responded to electrical stimuli, the signaling pathways allowing nerves to activate the muscle were intact and functional, and they responded to drugs just like a human would, including statins used to lower cholesterol and clenbuterol, a drug known to be used off-label as a performance enhancer for athletes.

“One of our goals is to use this method to provide personalized medicine to patients,” said Bursac. “We can take a biopsy from each patient, grow many new muscles to use as test samples and experiment to see which drugs would work best for each person.”

In some cases, a biopsy isn’t ideal, so Bursac is working to figure out how using induced pluripotent stem cells instead of biopsied cells could be a better option for some patients.

“There are a some diseases, like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy for example, that make taking muscle biopsies difficult,” said Bursac. “If we could grow working, testable muscles from induced pluripotent stem cells, we could take one skin or blood sample and never have to bother the patient again.”

Pretty remarkable – this is the future, guys.

 

 

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