Skeletal muscles are the most volumetric muscles in the body, controlling the body's movement, gesture keeping, and force-generating. However, the skeletal muscles have limited regenerative ability and volumetric muscle loss (VML) are usually irreversible, leading to lifelong pain and disability to the patients. Skeletal muscle tissue engineering is a promising method to treat VML by using biomaterials mimicking the properties of the extracellular matrix of skeletal muscle and cells that facilitate skeletal muscle formation. Therefore, we developed a conductive elastomer as a matrix to help generate skeletal muscle in vitro as well as prolong the electrical signal and withstand the mechanical loading of the skeletal muscles in vivo.<br/>Besides the conductivity and the elasticity, the shape-memory property of the biomaterials is also important since they enable the minimally invasive surgery of the treatment. In that case, a shape memory conductive elastomer was developed to promote myogenic differentiation of the myoblast cells, provide electroactive environments and mechanical support, and enable the minimally invasive implantation, helping the skeletal muscle tissue repair.<br/>To obtain functional engineered skeletal muscles, vascularization is an important goal that needs to be achieved. Adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) are reported to be effective in facilitating angiogenesis in the neo-tissues via paracrine. Therefore, we proposed a spatio-temporal cell delivery method: ADSCs were seeded on the nanofibrous microspheres (NFMs) which help the maintenance of their paracrine effects, and the cell-laden NFMs were encapsulated in the conductive hydrogel. By combining the promotion effects of the conductive materials on myogenic differentiation and the angiogenesis effects of ADSCs on neo-tissues, this spatio-temporal cell delivery strategy has great potential in skeletal muscle tissue regeneration.

Conductive biomaterials for skeletal muscle tissue engineering

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