Muscle lost through traumatic injury, congenital defect, or tumor ablation may soon be regenerated from within. A team of researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center has shown how stem cells in the body of mice and rats can be mobilized to form new muscle in damaged regions.
"Working to leverage the body’s own regenerative properties, we designed a muscle-specific scaffolding system that can actively participate in functional tissue regeneration," explains Sang Jin Lee, senior author on the study. This scaffold was implanted in the rats' tibialis anterior muscle (which is found below the knee), serving as a kind of home for the muscle progenitor cells to grow and develop.
After four weeks, a significant population of host stem cells and a mature network of blood vessels had formed within the scaffolds, with the most effective scaffold holding up to four times the number of cells of plain scaffolds thanks to its myogenic factor – a protein, in this case insulin-like growth factor 1, that binds to specific DNA sequences to encourage or accelerate the formation of muscular tissue (in a process called myogenesis).
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