Mighty Mice Grow New Muscle

Often one of the most traumatic things about severely injuring a muscle is the fact that the scar tissue won't allow for full use/range of motion after the wound is "fully healed". In Massachusettes, researchers are currently breaking huge ground in this area. They took mice and removed 30% of the muscle from their lower leg area. The researchers specially bioengineered microthreads made of fibrin and coated in human muscle cells acquired from surgery (the discarded material), and implanted this into the leg of the mice. The results were astounding. After only a couple days, the cells were "integrated into the mouse tissue", and, even long after the microthread had degraded (a full 10 weeks), the area was full of human cells. One of the researchers, George Pins, even comments that "the microthreads even stimulated the mice to regrow their own tissue, not just human cells". This directly relates to one of our SNBALs (SNBAL 2, Cell and Molecular). We talked about how researchers used cells in the hip replacement/any joint replacement to condone the re-growing of actual human muscle and connective tissue.

This article is of interest to me mainly because of the potential re-growing muscle has not only to prosthetics, but to medicine overall. If we have prosthetics completely coated in real "feeling" human skin and have a small amount of regrown human muscle, this would increase not only the efficiency of these prosthetics but also how the people receiving said prosthesis would view their own limb. Someone could have a completely prosthetic arm or leg covered in their own skin and muscle and it would be impossible to tell. Also, with sutures made from these microthreads, this could basically make scars and scar tissue a thing of the past. This would help countless people recover from traumatic accidents.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-11/microthreads-enhanced-human-cells-help-mice-grow-new-muscle