Human Muscle Grown In Lab

Last year, Bioengineered skeletal muscle from rat cells were successfully grown by scientists from Duke University. Now for the first time, scientists have grown human skeletal muscle that acts and responds just like native tissue. The tissue would react to stimuli like small electric shocks or drugs. Maybe this will help researchers to test new treatments on the human body. “The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish,” lead scientist Nenad Bursac said 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.”

Cells from human muscle biopsies were isolated and left to grow in the lab. They were expanded by more than 1000-fold. The resulting population had a certain amount of muscle precursor cells. They were put in a 3D mold with a gel and various nutrients to encourage cell growth and differentiation. The cells formed piles of muscles fibers that began to spontaneously twitch. The muscles was similar structure to the original tissue. The researchers attempted many tests to see if it had aspects of normal tissue. Amazingly, it responded as if it was an original muscle. “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.”