Tongue-on-a-Chip Offers Insights into Muscular Dystrophy

Muscular dystrophy is a rare, incurable genetic disease that leads to progressive muscle weakness and deterioration from early childhood. Researchers recently developed a chip to model this disease using human stem cells from patients with this disease. They created tongue muscle cells on the chip because tongues have less patient-to-patient strength variability than other muscles and can provide more accurate diagnostic and therapeutic information to clinicians. This tongue-on-a-chip can serve to replace animals used to study this disease as well as to provide new insights about this disease in humans not previously known before. For instance, the researchers used the chip to discover that a more mature stem cell type giving rise to muscles called myoblasts could not follow the normal cues to form proper muscles and give rise to smaller, weaker muscles instead. Beside basic and therapeutics research, this chip can also be used by clinicians to diagnose and monitor the progress of the disease in patients.