First Ever Human Muscle Tissue That Contracts Grown in Laboratory

In the past, we’ve covered many stories about things grown in laboratories, such as human blood vessels, diamonds, human bones and even self-healing muscles. But, this is a huge jump. In ground-breaking research, human muscle tissue that contracts as it does in the body has been grown in a laboratory.

Researchers from Duke University in Durham, NC, have grown human skeletal muscle that can respond by contracting to an external stimulus, whether it be drugs or electrical impulses.

Researchers say that this new breakthrough is important as it paves the way for laboratory testing on muscular diseases without invasive surgery.

"The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish," says study leader Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke.

In the study the cells were grown from myogenic precursor cells. These are cells that have grown past the early stem cell stage, but not progressed past this into full muscle tissue. The cells were then increased by 1,000 fold and formed into muscle tissue by using custom-built 3D scaffolding and grown with a nutrient-rich gel.  

This manmade muscle was then tested using pharmaceutical and electrical stimuli to see if it responded as it would if were in the human body. The results showed that the grown laboratory muscles mirrored the reaction to those seen in humans.

But why is this important? 

Bursac and his team explained there is a twofold need for lab-grown muscle tissue; the strong motivation to reduce the amount of testing on animals, and the lack of skeletal tissue for research purposes.

"This is of particular concern as there are a wide range of metabolic, neuromuscular and dystrophic disorders involving skeletal muscle that are under investigation and still lacking therapies," they noted.

By producing custom built human tissue, the research team also highlighted another benefit of the study, which was to create bespoke tissue for individual patients.

Prof Bursac said: "One of our goals is to use this method to provide personalised medicine to patients. 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."

Following on from this study, the next stage is to find a way to grow human muscles from stem cells instead of biopsied cells. This would be particularly useful with patients who suffer from muscular diseases in which taking a biopsy proves to be very difficult, such as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy patients.

Thanks to this study, Bursac believes the future of testing could stay within the laboratory: "The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish. 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."