Advances in Skeletal Muscle Engineering in Biomedical Research

Abstract

Skeletal muscle contributes significantly to human health, which is closely relevant to human locomotion, energy metabolism, immune regulation, and aging. Skeletal muscle holds the potential to recover its healthy condition via self‐repairing after minor damage. However, the capacity of sarcous self‐repair becomes incompetent following massive trauma or some myopathy, which raises a huge demand for skeletal muscle regeneration. Skeletal muscle engineering aims to rebuild muscle tissues in vitro to repair muscle injuries, develop pathological models, advance myopathy‐related research, and explore myopathy‐related medications. This review summarizes the advances in skeletal muscle engineering, including the cell resources that can be used in muscle regeneration, the recent progress of rebuilding methods for skeletal muscle engineering, as well as the biomedical applications of engineered skeletal muscle for tissue repair, drug testing, disease modeling, and soft robots. Finally, the challenges and future perspectives are discussed on improving skeletal muscle engineering by integrating multidisciplinary approaches, thus accelerating the technological innovation and translational application of this area.