Severe traumatic injuries that destroy large volumes of muscle can impact a person’s health, mobility, and quality of life for a lifetime. Promising new research co-led by Ritu Raman, the d’Arbeloff Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and MIT collaborators aims to restore mobility for those who have lost muscle through disease or trauma.
“For so many years, I had an idea that if we were able to exercise muscle grafts after they’d been implanted in an injury, we’d be able to keep the graft active [and] prevent it from atrophying by integrating it with the surrounding host tissue,” says Raman.
A new paper published in the journal Biomaterials presents research that shows that targeted actuation of implanted muscle grafts via noninvasive light stimulation restores motor function in mice to levels similar to those of healthy mice by two weeks post-injury.
