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: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:41PM
Everyone should know that these common pain meds can cause hearing loss in small doses (from most to least damaging, but this ordering depends on the specific studies you look at):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831770/ [nih.gov]
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/well/live/pain-relievers-tied-to-hearing-loss.html [nytimes.com]
Also, counter-intutively, hearing-aids prevent hearing loss. As with everything in your body, the nerves that transmit sound data from those hairs to your brain are "use it or lose it" so a hearing aid that boosts volume in the damaged frequencies keeps those nerves stimulated so they don't atrophy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:57PM
Thanks for the info, I had been hoping it was temporary. :(