Self-healing muscle grown in lab

In a first, scientists have grown living skeletal muscle that is more than 10 times stronger than any previous engineered muscles and has the ability to heal itself both inside the laboratory and inside an animal. The lab-grown muscle by researchers from Duke University is the first to heal itself after animal implantation. ‘The muscle we have made represents an important advance for the field. It’s the first time engineered muscle has been created that contracts as strongly as native neonatal skeletal muscle,’ said Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. A team led by Bursac and graduate student Mark Juhas discovered that preparing better muscle requires two things - well-developed contractile muscle fibres and a pool of muscle stem cells, known as satellite cells. Every muscle has satellite cells on reserve, ready to activate upon injury and begin the regeneration process.