PITTSBURGH — In the months after a roadside bomb in Afghanistan blew off part of his left thigh, Sgt. Ron Strang wondered if he would ever be able to walk normally again.


The explosion and subsequent rounds of surgery left Sergeant Strang, 28, a Marine, with a huge divot in his upper thigh where the quadriceps muscle had been. He could move the leg backward, but with so much of the muscle gone he could not kick it forward. He could walk, but only awkwardly.


“I got really good at falling,” he said of his efforts. And Sergeant Strang, a tall, athletic man, had to give up running.


But that was two years ago. Now he walks easily, can run on a treadmill and is thinking of a post-military career as a police officer. “If you know me, or know to look for it, you can see a slight limp,” he said. “But everybody else, they go, ‘I would never have guessed.’ ”


There is something else they would never have guessed: Sergeant Strang has grown new muscle thanks to a thin sheet of material from a pig.


The material, called extracellular matrix, is the natural scaffolding that underlies all tissues and organs, in people as well as animals. It is produced by cells, and for years scientists thought that its main role was to hold them in their proper position.


But researchers now know that this scaffolding also signals the body to grow and repair those tissues and organs. Armed with that knowledge, the new body builders are using this material from pigs and other animals to engineer the growth of replacement tissue in humans.


The technique used on Sergeant Strang, though still in development, holds particular promise for some of the thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who have been maimed by explosives and have lost so much muscle from an arm or a leg that amputation is sometimes the best alternative.


Sergeant Strang’s is one of the first cases in what will eventually be an 80-patient trial to grow limb muscle. It is financed by the Defense Department’s Office of Technology Transition, but it will include civilians as well.


Dr. Peter Rubin, a plastic surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who is a leader of the study, said that early results with Sergeant Strang and a handful of other patients showed that the animal scaffolding was spurring muscle growth. “We are seeing evidence of remodeling of tissues,” he said.


Last fall, Dr. Rubin cut out the scar tissue from Sergeant Strang’s leg and stitched a sheet resembling a thick piece of parchment paper — extracellular matrix from a pig urinary bladder, which had shown excellent results in lab studies — into the remaining healthy thigh muscle.


His body immediately started breaking down the matrix, which consists largely of collagen and other proteins. But the doctors expected, and wanted, that to happen — by degrading into smaller compounds, the matrix started the signaling process, recruiting stem cells to come to the site where they could become muscle cells.


“We’re trying to work with nature rather than fight nature,” said another leader of the study, Dr. Stephen Badylak, deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the university.


Dr. Badylak is a pioneer in the use of extracellular matrix, having discovered many of its properties more than two decades ago while performing biomedical engineering research at Purdue University. As part of his work on a mechanical heart device, he was looking for a way to move blood from one part of the body to another but wanted to avoid synthetic materials, which can cause blood clots.


“I thought, what looks like a tube?” he recalled. “A piece of intestine.” So using a research dog named Rocky, he replaced its main artery near its heart with a section of its small intestine. (“I’d have a tough time getting that experiment approved today,” Dr. Badylak said.)


When he arrived at work the next morning, he was expecting all sorts of problems. “But Rocky is standing up in his cage, wanting breakfast and wagging his tail,” Dr. Badylak said. “I thought, well, this is pretty cool.”


Later experiments showed that over time the tube had lost the internal cells that are specific to intestines and gained cells specific to blood vessels. “It had morphed into a blood-vessel-like structure, which we thought was incredible,” he said. “Eventually we figured out that it was not the whole intestine but just the extracellular matrix that was responsible.”