Peter Lee, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Division of Cardiac Surgery, has recently been awarded a three-year National Institutes of Health K08 grant to continue studies on tissue-engineered skeletal muscle delivering rhMG53 to treat volumetric muscle loss (total budget $561,000).
Dr. Lee has previously developed tissue-engineered skeletal muscle constructs named bioartificial muscles (BAMs). BAMs can serve as an in vitro model system for investigating the contractile and myokine function of skeletal muscles, as well as an implantable platform for delivering therapeutic proteins for regenerative medicine applications. With the K08, he will provide new findings that BAMs can be engineered to secrete a specific tissue repair protein as a novel approach to treat volumetric muscle loss.