Associate professor Richard Mills’ laboratory uses stem cells to generate human skeletal muscle and heart muscle tissues in the lab. This enables ‘disease in a dish’ studies that allows his lab to understand muscle disease. These ‘mini muscles’ act and function like the muscle in your body, giving Mills and his team the unique ability to measure important properties like muscle strength, kinetics and endurance. Using this approach, they can generate thousands of mini muscles for cell biology, and disease modelling applications; with the aim of finding new therapies for muscle disease.

Associate professor Richard Mills is principal investigator at the reNEW Melbourne node, and the group leader of the Muscle Bioengineering Laboratory at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI). Mills holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of Queensland, Brisbane and completed post-doctoral training at The Karolinska Institute, Stockholm and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Brisbane.