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from the wonder-what-that-would-do-in-the-eyes dept.
Within the inner ear, thousands of hair cells detect sound waves and translate them into nerve signals that allow us to hear speech, music, and other everyday sounds. Damage to these cells is one of the leading causes of hearing loss, which affects 48 million Americans.
Each of us is born with about 15,000 hair cells per ear, and once damaged, these cells cannot regrow. However, researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Massachusetts Eye and Ear have now discovered a combination of drugs that expands the population of progenitor cells (also called supporting cells) in the ear and induces them to become hair cells, offering a potential new way to treat hearing loss.
"Hearing loss is a real problem as people get older. It's very much of an unmet need, and this is an entirely new approach," says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and one of the senior authors of the study.
[...] Because this treatment involves a simple drug exposure, the researchers believe it could be easy to administer it to human patients. They envision that the drugs could be injected into the middle ear, from which they would diffuse across a membrane into the inner ear. This type of injection is commonly performed to treat ear infections.
Will J. McLean et al. Clonal Expansion of Lgr5-Positive Cells from Mammalian Cochlea and High-Purity Generation of Sensory Hair Cells. Cell Reports, February 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2017.01.066
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:03PM
I wonder what fraction of deafness is caused by hairs vs other problems. I went to school with a deaf dude who didn't bother with hearing aides because it was some kind of nerve thing and no level of pounding his ear hairs was going to jump the damaged circuit thats downstream of the ear hairs. More or less. Obviously I had no access to his medical records. But he was quite deaf and had no hearing aids.
Some cats (and dogs, and horses, and probably most everything else) are genetically deaf and I bet the failure modes are different between "listened to too much loud music in the open office" vs "born that way" so its probably a multidimensional problem.
Interesting hard sci fi plot or at least concept:
In a world with deaf people dumb Ameri-burgers talk to foreigners who don't speak English by yelling really loud hoping loud nonsense makes more sense to foreigners than normally spoken nonsense, because obviously it can't be that they don't hablo ingles its obviously that they're deaf. In a world without deaf people how will dumb Ameri-burgers talk to non English speaking foreigners (implying the immigrants don't outbreed and eliminate the English speaking folks obviously) My guess is by the time deafness is biomedically eliminated we'll all talk to foreigners via google translate ver 2040 on our phones. That will lead to entirely new weird sci fi movie plots like people not understanding the very concept that there exist foreign or made up languages that google translate can't communicate with. Imagine not having the cultural conception that there exist people that you can't communicate with. I mean we're kinda used to that today with SJWs and liberals but (oh just kidding about that, probably).
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:43PM
You are right there are many kinds of hearing loss. There's a lot of things that can go wrong. I was born with severe hearing loss that has gradually gotten worse with time but it is a rare unknown type for example (best theory is something is wrong with my nervous system, I've been told I need to find a neurologist interested in studying me). The hairs are confirmed there but not working properly, but they couldn't tell me what the issue is. Most of the audiologists I've seen find it interesting and go full-on nerd asking questions and such, or get sheepish and nervous having to admit they don't know about it.
Hearing aids don't benefit me either as much as other people because hearing aids are optimized for the upper ranges. My hearing loss is mostly in the lower ranges. This mostly is the same range most background noise happens in, which means most hearing aids struggle to deal with it. Mine work okay but are heavily customized (I even helped the audiologist myself, heh).
I only have about 25% of the human speech range that I am able to hear currently but I have a lot of skills to compensate with so it's not super obvious it's that bad. Most people don't realize how bad it is and how much guessing I'm doing for what they are saying until they ask a question and I answer a different question (because they asked about something on an unexpected topic and my guess was wrong).
It's funny talking to a new audiologist and they're like "how did you develop language skills??" Most people that get it later in life or that suffer damage don't have 30 years of experience dealing with it.