With help from pig tissue, people regrow muscle
Noncellular material implanted in patients attracts stem cells to fix injuries
By Nathan Seppa
Badly injured patients can regrow lost muscle with help from implanted sheets of tissue from pigs. An experimental treatment worked well for three of five volunteers and showed some benefit in a fourth, researchers report in the April 30 Science Translational Medicine.
“This is five patients, and that’s not huge. But it’s a benchmark,” says George Christ, a physiologist at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., who wasn’t involved in this study. “It’s good to see studies out there trying to address this huge gap in medical knowledge and treatment.”