Will artificial muscles be used to test drugs?

A group of scientists from Duke University have studied the development of human skeletal muscle from a laboratory capable of responding to effects like true skeletal muscle.

Artificial muscles will help test drugs in the future

To do so, scientists took stem cells, placed them on a "scaffold" made of nutrients, then reared in a test tube environment and waited for the fibers to connect to each other. . This research has been quite difficult, said Lauren Madden, a member of the team, to take a year to adjust variables such as gene density, optimize "culture and communication" matrices to get a complete muscle bundle, though they had similar experience before in animal cell experiments.

Having overcome that obstacle, the team began testing to determine if these artificial muscle bundles worked like real muscles. Thereby, they initially realized that these muscles had a convulsive reaction when impacted by electric current. The ultimate goal of this study is to create muscles that are able to respond to drugs like humans.

"We can take biopsies from every patient, develop new muscles to use as a prototype and test what drug is best for that person," said Nenand Bursac, the lead researcher .

If this project is successful, in the future scientists can use artificial muscle developed from the patient's stem cells to test what drugs are best for their bodies.