Human Skeletal Muscle Cells on Engineered 3D Platform Express Key Growth and Developmental Proteins

Current approaches in regenerative medicine to develop human skeletal muscle replicating native tissue for engrafts and high-throughput drug screening and gene therapy are still in their infancy and have not proven to recapitulate the behavior and regulatory processes present in endogenous skeletal muscle tissue. This stems at least in part from the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the emergent properties of in vitro skeletal muscle growth and development. To address this gap in our current knowledge, we have developed a stretchable micropatterned 3D human skeletal muscle platform that recapitulates organized and parallel growth of muscle cells and fibers as opposed to the randomly oriented cells growth on a 2D glass surface. Mass spectrometry of the muscle cells growing on the 3D platform express key myogenic proteins such as myoferlin for myoblast fusion required in the formation of muscle tissue, and proteins involved in mitochondrial health and biogenesis, in contrast to cells growing on 2D glass surface. These results demonstrate that the engineered human muscle cells grown on the 3D platform holds great promise to further establish the emergent properties of in vitro skeletal muscle growth and development for a wide range of biomedical applications.