Applications of Small Molecules in Muscle Tissue Engineering

Introduction: Skeletal muscles account for about 40% of the total body weight. Every year, hundreds of people lose at least part of their muscle tissue due to illness, war, and accidents. This can lead to disruption of activities such as breathing, movement, and social life. To this end, various therapeutic strategies such as medication therapy, cell therapy and tissue transplantation have been used or studied in muscle regeneration. However, there is no effective and well-defined clinical approach for treatment of muscle injuries and the severity of muscle injuries increase with age in most cases. Therefore, investigation for finding new and effective clinical approach for muscle regeneration is one of the most important issues in basic and clinical researches. Tissue engineering is considered as one of the promising and newest approach for skeletal muscle tissue regeneration and provides an appropriate model for personalized medicine and basic researches that can be used in personalized medicine and basic research. Besides biomaterials and cells, inducing factors are another element of tissue engineering. These factors influence epigenetic mechanisms and signaling pathway, thereby inducing proliferation, differentiation, and migration of cells used in muscle tissue engineering, and accelerates muscle formation in vitro. Recently, small molecules have been used as alternatives to growth factors or along with other inducing factors in muscle tissue engineering. Since they do not induce an immune reaction, penetrate easily to the cells and have a specific molecular target, therefore they have attracted much attention as the cost-effective inducing factors in tissue engineering. Conclusion:  Taken together, the effective small molecules in muscle tissue engineering can be used with different biomaterial conditions (e.g. hydrogel, decellularized tissue, and synthetic scaffolds) in both in vivo and in vitro, resulting to production of cost effective and highly efficient engineered muscle tissues that help to achieve therapeutical goals of muscle tissue engineering. Herein, we describe tissue engineering and review the small molecules used in skeletal muscle tissue engineering.