Muscles in the human body are being re-created from animals.
Doctors say that human muscles can be repaired with muscle scaffolding cells from animals like pigs.
The scaffolding is called an extracellular matrix, which is a part of all organs and tissue.
A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Sergeant Ron Strang underwent the surgery on his legs.
Doctors removed scar tissue from Strang’s wounded leg and stitched the extracelluar matrix from a pig bladder on to what was left of his thigh muscle.
The matrix degraded and signaled stem cells to repair the missing muscle cells that had been damaged by Strang’s injury, and it worked.
Strang’s condition has improved and he is able to walk much better after extensive post operation physical therapy.
Other stem cell related research with monkeys has shown that preadolescent testicular cancer patients that are left infertile by the cancer treatment may be able to have children of their own in the future.
Men with testicular cancer can have their sperm frozen and stored before they start treatment, but younger patients aren’t able to do this.
New research has taken sperm producing stem cells from male monkeys with cancer and replaced them after cancer treatment, which allowed nine out of the twelve monkeys to be fertile again.