Functional Muscle Tissue Grown from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Progress in tissue engineering consists of many small technology demonstrations similar to the one noted here. Researchers establish that a specific source of cells can be used with a specific recipe for culture and growth in order to generate organoids of a specific tissue type. Given success there as a starting point, further progress becomes possible towards a better quality of structured tissue, and all of the other line items needed on the way to the mass production of patient-matched tissues for use in clinical medicine. Biomedical engineers have grown the first functioning human skeletal muscle from induced pluripotent stem cells. The advance builds on work published in 2015 when researchers grew the first functioning human muscle tissue from cells obtained from muscle biopsies. The ability to start from cellular scratch using non-muscle tissue will allow scientists to grow far more muscle cells, provide an easier path to genome editing and cellular therapies, and develop individually tailored models of rare muscle diseases for drug discovery and basic biology studies. "Starting with pluripotent stem cells that are not muscle cells, but can become all existing cells in our body, allows us to grow an unlimited number of myogenic progenitor cells. These progenitor cells resemble adult muscle stem cells called 'satellite cells' that can theoretically grow an entire muscle starting from a single cell." Induced pluripotent stem cells are cells taken from adu...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs