“One of our goals is to use this method to provide personalized medicine to patients,” Bursac said in a press release. “We can take a biopsy from each patient, grow many new muscles to use as test samples and experiment to see which drugs would work best for each person.”

After working with cells for years, making bioartifical muscles from animal cells, the team turned to human cells. They started with a sample of cells that were in a stage beyond the stem cell level, but hadn’t yet fully developed into muscle cells. The team grew these cells on a three-dimensional, suspended in a nourishing gel to keep them viable.

It took years to find the right combination of cell and nourishment, but the scientists were finally able to grow the cells to muscle fibers.

Next, Bursac and Madden tested the artificial muscle to see how closely it resembled living muscle. In a research first, the team showed that the muscle contracted in response to an electrical stimuli.

The research appears in this week’s eLife.