Groundbreaking study grows human muscle tissue in lab conditions

US researchers have for the first time been able to grow human skeletal muscle in a lab that responds to external stimuli in the same way as natural tissue.

The Duke University project saw the scientists take a small sample of human cells that had already progressed beyond stem cells, but had not yet become muscle tissue. These were expanded and put into 3D scaffolding filled with a nourishing gel, allowing them to form aligned and functioning muscle fibres.

Subsequent tests showed these lab-grown muscles contracted and responded exactly like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.

It is thought that this material could be used to test new drugs and study diseases in functioning human muscle outside of the human body, while reducing the need for muscle biopsies among sufferers of conditions such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which affects around one in every 3,500 boys.

Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, said: "We are working to test drugs' efficacy and safety without jeopardising a patient's health and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseases."