Building muscle in the lab

This provides a potential for treating patients with muscle diseases – and for those who would like to eat meat, but don’t want to kill animals.

18-Aug-2023 - ETH Zurich Professor Ori Bar-​Nur and his team grow muscle cells in the laboratory. In this case, they are mouse cells, but the researchers are also interested in human and cow cells. Promising applications resonate with both: human muscle tissue cultured in the lab could be used in surgery, ...

Regenerative therapies for previously incurable muscle diseases

Million euro support for MyoPax

22-Sep-2022 - MyoPax, a new spin-off of the Max Delbrück Center and Charité, receives a 1.3 million euros loan to jump-start its entrepreneurial activities. The start-up develops regenerative therapies for previously incurable muscle diseases using its innovative muscle stem cell technology. The BioInnovation ...

Using mRNA delivery to improve muscle strength

Targeted correction of genetic defects

16-Mar-2022 - Mutations that lead to muscle atrophy can be repaired with the gene editor CRISPR-Cas9. A team led by ECRC researcher Helena Escobar has now introduced the tool into human muscle stem cells for the first time using mRNA, thus discovering a method suitable for therapeutic applications. It may be ...

Drug to rejuvenate muscle cells developed

Elderly to feel fitter, faster and stronger

18-Feb-2019 - Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have developed a promising drug that has proven to significantly increase muscle size, strength and metabolic state in aged mice, according to a study. As we age, our bodies increasingly lose the ability to repair and rebuild ...

New insights into muscular dystrophy point to potential treatment avenues

03-Jun-2016 - The average healthy man is 54 percent muscle by mass, but people with muscular dystrophy, an incurable, genetic condition, have almost no muscle at terminal stages of the disease. New research from The Rockefeller University provides insights about what causes patients' muscles to degenerate and ...

New Research Method Opens Door to Therapy with Human Muscle Stem Cells

Promising Method Developed

29-Aug-2014 - Stem cells are essential for the repair of muscle damage, but all attempts to manipulate human muscle stem cells for therapy have thus far failed. Now Dr. Andreas Marg and Prof. Simone Spuler of the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint cooperation between the Max Delbrück ...

Discovery of new muscle repair gene

22-Nov-2011 - An international team of researchers from Leeds, London and Berlin has discovered more about the function of muscle stem cells, thanks to next-generation DNA sequencing techniques. The work, which was co-led from the University of Leeds' School of Medicine and the Charité, Berlin, is published in ...

Stem cell study could pave the way to treatment for age-related muscle wasting

19-May-2011 - A team led by developmental biologist Professor Christophe Marcelle has nailed the mechanism that causes stem cells in the embryo to differentiate into specialised cells that form the skeletal muscles of animals' bodies. The scientists published their results in Nature.Scientists world wide are ...