Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centers Institute for Regenerative Medicine have hit upon a new strategy for tissue healing: mobilizing the bodys stem cells to the site of injury. Thus harnessing the bodys natural healing powers might make in body regeneration of muscle tissue is a possibility.

Sang Jin Lee, assistant professor of Medicine at Wake Forest, and his colleagues implanted small bits of biomaterial scaffolds into the legs of rats and mice. When they embedded these scaffolds with proteins that mobilize muscle stem cells (like insulin-like growth factor-1 or IGF-1), the stem cells migrated from the muscles to the bioscaffolds and formed muscle tissue.

Working to leverage the bodys own regenerative properties, we designed a muscle-specific scaffolding system that can actively participate in functional tissue regeneration, said Lee. This is a proof-of-concept study that we hope can one day be applied to human patients.

If patients have large sections of muscle removed because of infections, tumors or accidents, muscle grafts from other parts of the body are typically used to restore at least some of the missing muscle. Several laboratories are trying the grow muscle in the laboratory from muscle biopsies that can be then transplanted back into the patient. Growing muscle on scaffolds fashioned from biomaterials have also proven successful.

Lees technique overcomes some of the short-comings of these aforementioned procedures. As Lee put it, Our aim was to bypass the challenges of both of these techniques and to demonstrate the mobilization of muscle cells to a target-specific site for muscle regeneration.

Most tissues in our bodies contain a resident stem cell population that serves to regenerate the tissue as needed. Lee and his colleagues wanted to determine if these resident stem cells could be coaxed to move from the tissue or origin, muscle in this case, and embeds themselves in an implanted scaffold.

In their first experiments, Lee and his team implanted scaffolds into the leg muscles of rats. After retrieving them several weeks later, it was clear that the muscle stem cell population (muscle satellite cells) not only migrated into the scaffold, but other stem cell populations had also taken up residence in the scaffolds. These scaffolds were also contained an interspersed network of blood vessels only 4 weeks aster transplantation.

In their next experiments, Lee and others laced the scaffolds with different cocktails of proteins to boost the stem cell recruitment properties of the implanted scaffolds. The protein that showed the most robust stem cell recruitment ability was IGF-1. In fact, IGF-1-laced scaffolds had four times the number of cells as plain scaffolds and increased formation of muscle fibers.

The protein [IGF-1] effectively promoted cell recruitment and accelerated muscle regeneration, said Lee.

For their next project, Lee would like to test the ability of his scaffolds to promote muscle regeneration in larger laboratory animals.

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