New bacteria-derived hydrogel effective in muscle tissue regeneration

Associate Professor Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz from DTU Health Tech said, “This combination of feats is rarely encountered in the field as the hydrogels that exist simply don’t function as well as they’re supposed to because muscle-building is mechanically demanding.”

The new frontier in regenerative medicine

The research team from the Technical University of Denmark, led by Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz, capitalized on the body’s regenerative capacity using the native bioproduction facilities which are found in bacteria.

They synthesized a new biopolymer with tissue-healing properties from the bacteria. This polymer was then used to manufacture a durable, resilient, and elastic hydrogel with muscle regeneration capability.

After injecting the durable, resilient, and elastic hydrogel into the site of muscle defect in rats, they observed that healing was successful without infection or further complications, though further studies need to be done.

“All the hydrogel-treated groups showed an increased number of myofibers displaying centrally located nuclei (newborn myofibers) when compared to the non-treated groups,” the authors stated in the study.

“With PAMA, the team has shown that they can achieve tissue regeneration in rats without using cells, and they expect much better healing by combining their bactogels with either muscle progenitor cells or stem cells,” as per the press release.

Better therapies against musculoskeletal injuries

“Skeletal tissue engineering goes back as far as the early 1960s when Konigsberg used chicken embryonic stem cells to generate cross-striated muscle fibers,” the study explains.

The role collagen plays in the development of mature muscle constructs was clear back then. Other biopolymers have emerged throughout the years as options, but “injectable hydrogels with high bioactivity and cell-infiltration capacity showed to be the most promising.”

However, most bioactive hydrogels display subpar mechanical properties that do not fit the mechanically demanding milieu of musculoskeletal tissues, such as muscles,” Dolatshahi-Pirouz continues. So they “methacrylated” a bacteria-derived biomaterial. It opens “a new and exciting avenue in the search of the next groundbreaking hydrogel system.”

This kind of “regenerative machine biology” is unexplored territory. Muscle loss from injury or disease costs $400 billion in healthcare expenses every year, which shows the impact that the bactogel could have.

Their findings suggest that bioactive hydrogel system made from bacteria holds “great promise for therapeutic applications such as muscle repair, regeneration, and the development of in vitro models for drug screening and disease modeling,” as stated in the study in Bioactive Materials.

“Our new results could foster better therapies against musculoskeletal injuries in athletes, the elderly, as well as in wounded soldiers or others involved in accidents giving rise to traumatic muscle injuries,” Dolatshahi-Pirouz believes.

“I imagine a future where bacteria-derived polymers or put simply “bactomers” revolutionize the field of regenerative medicine. A future, into other words, where bacteria in so-called regenerative bacto-baths secrete regenerative bactomers on demand to heal injured tissues in patients,” Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz concludes in the press release.