Inflammation’s Quiet Cure
Extracellular Vesicles from Regenerating Skeletal Muscle Mitigate Muscle Atrophy in an ALS Mouse Model
Written by: Charlene Betourney
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is a brutal disease that robs people of their ability to move by slowly destroying the nerve cells that control muscles. There’s no cure, and treatments barely scratch the surface.
A big part of the problem? Chronic inflammation, which eats away at muscle and blocks the body’s natural ability to repair it.
In a bold new approach, the Yao lab turned to something unexpected—tiny bubbles of healing material, called extracellular vesicles, released by muscles as they recover from injury. When these vesicles, harvested 14 days after acute muscle damage, were applied to lab-grown muscle cells under inflammatory stress, they helped the cells grow and fuse like healthy muscle should.
Even more striking, when injected into ALS mice, the vesicles seemed to reverse muscle wasting. They nudged the immune system toward healing, tamped down destructive signals, and jump-started muscle repair.
It’s early days, but these microscopic messengers from healing muscle may hold a surprising key to slowing, or even stopping, the muscle loss in ALS.
