Cutting muscle for bone regeneration (割肉修骨)

As gold standard for large-sized bone defects regeneration, autologous bone transplantation has always faced the difficulty of insufficient donors. Moreover, most of the well-designed biomaterials could only achieve 20-50% repair rate. Herein, we innovatively proposed the strategy of "Cutting muscle for bone regeneration". Considering the hierarchical structure of muscle was similar to collagen in bone, we prepared hierarchical mineralized muscle for bone regeneration. Based on the unfolding of proteins induced by guanidine hydrochloride, this strategy fully utilized the complexation of troponin with Ca2+, as well as the spatial structure of interlaced arrangement of thick and thin filaments, ultimately achieved the striped mineral distribution within myofibrils. Surprisingly, the mineralized muscle greatly promoted the bone regeneration, and basically achieved complete repair after 3 months. Compared with bone, muscle is easy to regenerate, and bone defect regeneration can be achieved by mineralized muscle, which can solve the difficulty of insufficient autologous bone donors.