Injectable Gel Speeds Up Recovery of Mechanically Damaged Muscles

We are aware of skeletal muscle as a major organ of the human body involved in our all-voluntary physical activities. It is generally exposed to multiple types of injuries during several causal and accidental events like road accidents, high intensity athletic activities, battlefield activities of soldiers, etc. These activities result in compromise of regenerating ability of muscle stem cells due to excessive muscle loss and disrupts the structural integrity of muscle fibers. Most of the conventional therapeutic approaches are found to be inadequate to overcome this widely occurring problem. To overcome the disadvantages e.g., longer duration and inefficient structural recovery of damaged muscle of conventional treatments and to treat the muscle damage more effectively, we have developed an advanced biomaterial system, MusCAMLR, using a carbon material incorporated hydrogel. The name MusCAMLR comes from musculo responsive polymer−carbon composite for assisting myotubular regeneration which clearly dictates the key features of the developed system. MusCAMLR is a polymer carbon composite which is responsive to the physiological environment of skeletal muscle and capable of supporting the regeneration of muscle cells. MusCAMLR inculcates muscle-like arrangement and mechanical compatibility in physiological condition with muscle cells, which ultimately confers its potential to support the regeneration of muscle cells. Further, a mechanically damaged muscle in rat model was developed to validate the efficiency of MusCAMLR. We observed that MusCAMLR is capable of producing structural recovery of mechanically damaged muscles within a very short period of time of around three days which generally takes a few weeks by conventional methods.