Health & Medicine
Scientists Grow Contracting Human Muscles in the Lab
Catherine Griffin
First Posted: Jan 14, 2015 11:03 AM EST
Growing human organs in the lab may seem like a fantasy, but it's something that scientists have been working toward for years. Now, researchers have grown human skeletal muscle in the lab that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli.
"The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish," said Nenad Bursac, one of the researchers, in a news release. "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."
In this case, the researchers started with a small sample of human cells that had already progressed beyond stem cells but hadn't yet become muscle tissue. Then, the scientists expanded these "myogenic precursors" by more than 1000-fold and put them into a supportive, 3D scaffolding filled with a nourishing gel that allowed them to form aligned and functioning muscle fibers.
The researchers then conducted a barrage of tests on these fibers to see how closely they resembled native tissue inside a human body. In the end, they found that the muscles contracted in response to electrical stimuli, which is a first for human muscle grown in a lab. In addition, the scientists found that signaling pathways allowed nerves to activate the muscle and were intact and functional.
"One of the 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."
Currently, the researchers are working to correlate efficacy of drugs in patients with the effects on lab-grown muscles. In the future, these lab-grown muscles could be a fertile testing ground that could help patients.
The findings are published in the journal eLife.
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
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NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone
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First Posted: Jan 14, 2015 11:03 AM EST
Growing human organs in the lab may seem like a fantasy, but it's something that scientists have been working toward for years. Now, researchers have grown human skeletal muscle in the lab that contracts and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli.
"The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish," said Nenad Bursac, one of the researchers, in a news release. "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."
In this case, the researchers started with a small sample of human cells that had already progressed beyond stem cells but hadn't yet become muscle tissue. Then, the scientists expanded these "myogenic precursors" by more than 1000-fold and put them into a supportive, 3D scaffolding filled with a nourishing gel that allowed them to form aligned and functioning muscle fibers.
The researchers then conducted a barrage of tests on these fibers to see how closely they resembled native tissue inside a human body. In the end, they found that the muscles contracted in response to electrical stimuli, which is a first for human muscle grown in a lab. In addition, the scientists found that signaling pathways allowed nerves to activate the muscle and were intact and functional.
"One of the 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."
Currently, the researchers are working to correlate efficacy of drugs in patients with the effects on lab-grown muscles. In the future, these lab-grown muscles could be a fertile testing ground that could help patients.
The findings are published in the journal eLife.
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone