A team of scientists from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Massachusetts, and CellThera, a private company located in WPI’s Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, have regenerated functional muscle tissue in mice, opening the door for a new clinical therapy to treat people who suffer major muscle trauma. This study is part of a multi-year program funded, in part, by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to support the development of new technologies and therapies for people who suffer serious wounds and limb loss.
In the study, a portion of a leg muscle was removed from mice. Untreated mice grew scar tissue (left image, blue area). Mice receiving seeded microthreads had minimal scarring and regrew functional muscle (right image). Photograph courtesy of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
The team used a novel protocol to coax mature human muscle cells into a stem cell-like state and grew those reprogrammed cells on biopolymer microthreads. The threads were placed in a wound created by surgically removing a large section of leg muscle from a mouse. Over time, the threads and cells restored near-normal function to the muscle, as reported in a paper published in the November issue of Tissue Engineering. The microthreads, which were used as a scaffold to support the reprogrammed human cells, seemed to accelerate the regeneration process by recruiting progenitor mouse muscle cells, suggesting that they alone could become a therapeutic tool for treating major muscle trauma.
“We are pleased with the progress of this work, and frankly we were surprised by the level of muscle regeneration that was achieved,” said Raymond Page, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at WPI, chief scientific officer at CellThera, and corresponding author on the paper.
The researchers say that these finding suggests that fibrin microthreads alone could be used to treat major muscle trauma while research on enhancing regeneration with reprogrammed human cells continues.
