Immune Cells Help Older Muscles Heal Like New

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have found a critical component for growing self-healing muscle tissues from adult muscle—the immune system. The discovery in mice is expected to play an important role in studying degenerative muscle diseases and enhancing the survival of engineered tissue grafts in future cell therapy applications.
In 2014, the group led by Nenad Bursac, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke, debuted the world’s first self-healing, lab-grown skeletal muscle. It contracted powerfully, integrated into mice quickly and demonstrated the ability to heal itself both inside the laboratory and inside an animal.