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They are building a functioning physical 3D model of human muscle!!!

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Last week I shared a wonderful article reporting that a working human muscle has been grown in the lab. I still genuinely wonder at the advances that occur in our time and I find that one find often leads to another.

The article on medium referenced another describing the ongoing efforts to build a functioning model of human muscle so that we can use it to further understand how to treat and cure illnesses

being three-dimensional provides tissue with stability, acts as a scaffold for repair, and even seems to be involved in the progression of certain diseases (Pampaloni et al., 2007; Lancaster and Knoblich, 2014)

A revelation I missed the first time I read this article is that

Skeletal muscle has an amazing capacity for repair due to the presence of a small population of stem cells residing within the tissue (Mauro, 1961)

This is new information to me and could explain a lot but right now my mind has more questions that answer.

  • Is this why muscle cells don’t get cancer?
  • But stem cells could be a reason muscles would get cancer!!!
  • What other organs or structures contain stem cells? Is there a list?
  • Is this really the main reason muscle cells regenerate so fast? I thought excellent blood supply and other factors were key, though this makes a lot of sense

After a wonderful explanation of how the new model was arrived at we’re left with the more sobering question of how mainstream science will adopt it

for pharmaceutical companies to switch to a three-dimensional tissue model, the new model must first uncover important biological findings that are obscured in standard two-dimensional cultures

I’ve kept this intro short because I spent my available time reading the articles and getting excited so checkout the full story Tissue engineering: Muscling in on the third dimension to learn more.

I hope you enjoyed learning a little more about your body.

Until next time have a great day.

Colin

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