Health News Lovecraft’s Herbert West believed that individual body parts could be isolated and reanimated independently. Now Duke University researchers have done him one better by growing the first-ever contracting human skeletal muscle – hopefully without the corpse-snatching –, the University’s Pratt School of Engineering announced in a press release on Tuesday. Somewhere in there is a joke about how the only way scientists can grow muscles is in the lab, since they can’t do it in the gym. Seriously though, the tissue – which responds to electrical pulses, biochemical signals, pharmaceuticals, and other external stimuli just like natural tissue does – should enable researchers to test drugs and study diseases in functioning muscle that is not actually attached to a human body. “The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish,” said associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University and study leader Nenad Bursac – who despite that name is a real person and not a character from an Asimov short story.
Read more about Scientists flex their lab-grown muscle
No comments:
Post a Comment