Muscle grown in a lab heals itself after injury

It is world’s first – a muscle grown in the lab healed itself after an injury. Biomedical engineers at the Duke University in U.K have grown a living skeletal muscle that resembles like the real.

The muscle contracts powerfully and rapidly, integrates into mice quickly and for the first time, demonstrates the ability to heal itself both inside the laboratory and inside an animal.

The bioengineered muscle was literally watched through a window on the back of a living mouse. The novel technique allowed for real-time monitoring of the muscle’s integration and maturation inside a living, walking animal.

Several trials were done in the lab by the biomedical engineers to put their muscle to test. By stimulating it with electric pulses, they measured its contractile strength, showing that it was more than 10 times stronger than any previous engineered muscles.

They damaged it with a toxin found in snake venom to prove that the satellite cells could activate, multiply and successfully heal the injured muscle fibres. Then they moved it out of a dish and into a mouse. Every muscle has satellite cells on reserve, ready to activate upon injury and begin the regeneration process. The key to the team’s breakthrough was successfully creating the microenvironments – called niches – where these stem cells await their call to duty.

This research will have immense value in humans whose muscles get damaged due to various reasons.