Inflammation is a physiological process through which the white blood cells in the body protect the organism against infection or harm. Recent research studies performed by biomedical engineers at Duke University gave them insight on the precise mechanism of inflammation in the human body. The following article presents the experiments run by the scientists at Duke as well as the groundbreaking results these experiments yielded.
Exercise is known to be of great benefit to the human body and scientific studies are showing time and time again the important effects that exercise has on the cells in the body to fight inflammation. The experiment that the biomedical engineers at Duke University conducted involved the stimulation of engineered tissues and cells.
The scientists at Duke University utilized cutting edge research instruments. They used interferon gamma, which is a proinflammatory molecule that is directly related to muscle-wasting medical problems. Over the course of seven days, the muscles that the scientists engineered in the laboratory were exposed to interferon gamma molecules in order to induce chronic inflammation. The muscles, as a result, lost a big portion of both their size and strength.
Following that, the scientists then repeated the experiment mentioned above but this time, however, they stimulated the muscle with electrodes in order to imitate the effects of exercise. As a result, the effects of inflammation were entirely negated.
Surprised with these groundbreaking results, the scientists at Duke University then ran a series of investigations and found that the effect of the exercise stimulus was blocking a particular molecular pathway in the engineered muscle cells. As a matter of fact, when performing an exercise, the signal induced by the pro-inflammatory interferon gamma molecules was opposed by the muscle cells. These results, which were not expected to occur by the scientists at Duke, demonstrated the importance of exercise in combating chronic inflammation in the human body. In addition to that, the results also show how imperative engineered human cells and tissues are in helping scientists make ground breaking discoveries regarding potential treatments as well disease mechanisms.
It is important to mention that the work of the biomedical engineers at Duke University resulted in a scientific article that was published in the journal "Science Advances".
