Abstract

Traumatic injuries, tumor resections, and degenerative diseases can damage skeletal muscle and lead to functional impairment and severe disability. Skeletal muscle regeneration is a complex process that depends on various cell types, signaling molecules, architectural cues, and physicochemical properties to be successful. To promote muscle repair and regeneration, various strategies for skeletal muscle tissue engineering have been developed in the last decades. However, there is still a high demand for the development of new methods and materials that promote skeletal muscle repair and functional regeneration to bring approaches closer to therapies in the clinic that structurally and functionally repair muscle. The combination of stem cells, biomaterials, and biomolecules is used to induce skeletal muscle regeneration. In this review, we provide an overview of different cell types used to treat skeletal muscle injury, highlight current strategies in biomaterial-based approaches, the importance of topography for the successful creation of functional striated muscle fibers, and discuss novel methods for muscle regeneration and challenges for their future clinical implementation.

Highlights

  • Hydrogels based on natural elements are ideal candidates as they elicit a limited inflammatory response, have structurally similar elements to the body and they are highly effective in triggering the skeletal muscle regeneration process [136,137]

  • These results suggest that besides vascularization, other factors appear to be crucial to the fate of regeneration

  • The results demonstrated that C2C12 cells were well aligned along the direction of PVA was leached from a PVA/PCL mixture to obtain the uniaxially aligned PCL bundles

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Summary

Introduction

Myofibers are formed by the fusion of myoblasts into elongated, cylindrical, multi-nucleated fibers named myotubes, which are 10–100 μm in diameter, depending on the location and function of the muscle [3]. They represent the functional unit of skeletal muscle. Biomaterial scaffolds can be used to locally control and provide guidance for tissue regeneration These scaffolds offer an artificial ECM for cells and mimic the properties of tissue. This has led to a range of multifunctional biomaterials that can fulfill several important functions, such as cell guidance [5], drug delivery [6], and stem cell fate regulation [7]

Strategies for Skeletal Muscle Regeneration
Cell Types for the Regeneration of Skeletal Muscle
Pericytes
Biomaterials for the Transplantation of Striated Muscle Cells
Natural Hydrogels
Synthetic Hydrogels
Biomechanical Strategies for the Generation of Skeletal Muscle Tissue
Scaffold Topographies for Improved Generation of Muscle Tissue
Findings
Conclusions
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