A Cell-Type-Specific Atlas of the Inner Ear Transcriptional Response to Acoustic Trauma

Not sure if this has been posted yet--I did a quick search and didn't find anything, but if that's not the case then I'll just delete.

This was published on Sept 28, 2021, so it's recent, and the findings are very interesting to me:

"We use RiboTag and single-cell RNA sequencing to survey the cell-type-specific molecular landscape of the mouse inner ear before and after noise trauma. We identify induction of the transcription factors STAT3 and IRF7 and immune-related genes across all cell-types. Yet, cell-type-specific transcriptomic changes dominate the response. The ATF3/ATF4 stress-response pathway is robustly induced in the type 1A noise-resilient neurons, potassium transport genes are downregulated in the lateral wall, mRNA metabolism genes are downregulated in outer hair cells, and deafness-associated genes are downregulated in most cell types. This transcriptomic resource is available via the Gene Expression Analysis Resource and provides a blueprint for the rational development of drugs to prevent and treat NIHL."​

"Critically important is the identification of new drugs to prevent and treat NIHL and ARHL. Ideal candidates would be low-cost, well-tolerated, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved, orally administered drugs. We intersected the drug-target interaction data from DrugCentral (Ursu et al., 2017) with gene expression changes identified in our combined datasets. We searched for drugs that had an opposing effect on the gene expression change induced by noise exposure. The top-ranking candidate drug to reverse molecular changes induced by noise, and therefore possibly prevent NIHL, was the anti-diabetic drug metformin"
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There are some other posts on Tinnitus Talk with studies showing that Metformin can help with neuron repair in women. It seems to be worth studying imo.

 

Sounds promising!