JERUSALEM, May 16 (Xinhua) -- Israeli researchers at the Bar Ilan University (BIU) have developed a platform for modeling deadly human muscular system diseases in worms, the BIU said in a statement on Thursday.
The platform, co-developed by Israel's Sheba Medical Center, streamlines disease studies, paving the way for more personalized disease modeling and enhancing the effectiveness of drug screening.
This innovation was achieved through an advanced method utilizing extracellular vesicles derived from patients' blood samples.
These extracellular vesicles carry various molecules representing cellular contents, facilitating cross-species information exchange and enabling the study of human diseases in worms.
As described in the journal Disease Models & Mechanisms, the team collected extracellular vesicles from patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder that leads to progressive muscle weakness and degeneration, and transferred them to C. elegans worms.
The BIU said the results were remarkable, with the worms displaying muscular dystrophy reminiscent of symptoms in patients.
This new method also has the potential to be applied to studies of other diseases beyond genetic disorders, the BIU concluded. ■
