Lab-grown muscle implants

"While the body has a capacity to repair small defects in skeletal muscle, the only option for larger defects is to surgically move muscle from one part of the body to another. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul," said George Christ, Ph.D., a professor at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Researchers from Wake Forest have released promising results from their latest experiments implanting laboratory-grown muscles into mice. A small extracted sample of muscle from the mouse was grown on a material in derived from pigs’ bladders the lab. For the first five minutes of every hour the the muscles were “exercised” by a computer-controlled device that slowly expands and contracts. The testing showed that within two months mice with implanted muscle could exert a force equal to 70% of native muscle as compared to a 30% force of non-implanted mice recovering from the same damage.