The Problem

Sarcopenia is an age-related disease affecting muscle mass and strength. It affects 5.3% of the UK population making them two to three times more likely to develop physical disabilities. Although patients are prescribed lifestyle changes, like exercise and a high protein diet, many don’t respond or are unable to adhere because they’re too frail or bedridden. No other treatment is available. Sarcopenia is currently estimated to cost the NHS over £2.5 billion/year.

Muscle ageing and sarcopenia research relies heavily on the use of mice and rats. Inducing the condition in animals can cause them moderate to severe suffering. Lívia estimates that 5.4 million rodents were used in research published over the last 5 years, but this is a conservative estimate of the true numbers, as not all experiments are published.

Sadly, this has not benefited patients as drugs under development have all failed at the clinical trial stage.

The Project

In this project, Lívia and her team are developing human muscle models which are essential to the development of new therapeutics. They’ve invented a system to allow the generation of multiple sections of tissue-engineered muscle – essentially, a mini-muscle that looks and contracts like an actual muscle.

The technology allows them to scale the system up and generate up to 10 times more samples than any other available method. This is ideal for drug development where large numbers of potential drug molecules are screened at a time.

Although the system was originally created using cells from mice, this project aims to adapt the technology to make it human-specific. Livia and her team are using human muscle cells and animal-free reagents, replacing the mouse cells and other animal-derived products like foetal bovine serum used in the original system.

The Potential

Making this technology human-specific and 100% animal-free is a significant undertaking but will make the model more relevant to human patients. In the longer term, this system will accelerate the discovery of new therapies for sarcopenia patients. It may also allow the development of muscle models for other conditions, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and heart diseases.

Using local data from collaborators, Lívia estimates that the uptake of this technology by pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers will enable the replacement of 41% of animals across ageing research, which is the equivalent to nearly 3 million mice and rats over the next 5 years.