Audion Therapeutics

Here is another company working on hearing loss and cell regeneration.

I think this is the one that discovered that Notch inhibition transforms subcells into haircells.

nothing new but an other one toput on the radar

http://www.audiontherapeutics.com/

 

yes, it's the compamy Dr. Albert Edge from Harvard working with.
let's hope for some new findings.. they still stuck in hair cell regeneration
in adults.

 

It's a very young project, but I am impresseds by their round A funding. Eli Lilly is huge, and this company is well known for being extremly risk averse, they would never invest in something without at least a strong proof of concept.

What is catching my attention is this sentence: "To date, Audion has identified several compounds that can regenerate hair cells in laboratory–based cell culture assays".

It means one things that blows my mind:
We knew that a gene in mice, called Rb1, shuts down the growth of new hair cells early in development. Mature mice were able to regenerate their hair cells when the Rb1 gene was blocked.

--> this was never tested on human hair cell (to my limited knowledge ^_^), but here it seems they did it according to their statement!!?​

Maybe this is the reason why Eli Lilly invested money in this company...
Let's wait & see !

 

Audion is arround for some years, they had earlier some partners like Sanofi.
Now Lilly invested, that's good.
I guess this kind of companies like Audion,Soundpharma,Roche, Novartis do a lot research in the background.
I'm very curious about the Genvec/Novartis human trial.

 

They might as well cancel their drug after this one.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25873862

 

Dear,


Thank you for your interest in Audion and our drug development programme for a potential treatment of acquired sensorineural hearing loss. We advise you to contact your ENT doctor and discuss the current available treatments and devices that best suit your specific needs.


The clinical trial is planned to commence in the second half of 2017 and we recommend that you follow the news released online.


Thank you again and we wish you all the best


Audion Team

 

@AnonymousGiraffe not sure to understand, are you quoting a message you got from Audion or are you from Audion ?

Thanks anyway, this is good news.

 

@Foncky, I sent them an email and this is what I got as Auto-reply.

 

That's very exciting to know trials start this year!! I'm not too familiar with their treatment plan.

 

Basically they said go get some hearing aides because there are no treatments for hearing loss.

 

Well, I don't know. I think we should be a little bit more optimistic about these developments. Six months ago I also received an email from them in which they said: still planning clinical trials. And nowadays they are saying second half of 2017 so apparently they are making big progress. They have same kind of approach as frequency for hair cell regeneration. They work together with UCL London and a bunch of other Universities around Europa. They are part of the "Regain Your Hearing" project supported by the European Commission. http://www.regainyourhearing.eu/

The company is originally dutch and I am doing my best to bring awareness for these kind of projects in the media and the government here in the Netherlands. The past months there was a quite a lot of attention for hearing loss among the youth in the media. I am trying and hoping that the next big news event will be about the regeneration of the hearing.

 

@Samir you made the situation pretty clear in the Acousia Therapeutics thread. I was already wondering where the Germans where regarding these kind of projects. But it very good to see that they are all working together behind the scenes. Audion, Acousia, Massachusetts, Stanford and Marcelino at Sheffield. I actually think that the trial Audion Therapeutics planned for later this year is a part of the Otostem project. Or at least they have a very strong connection with the project.

 

@Samir Audion received 712.000 Euro from the Otostem project. And this funding was part of the FP7-HEALTH-2013-INNOVATION-1. And at the moment we have the Horizon 2020 program and Audion received 5.8 million Euro from this program. I don't know about all the other partners of the Otosem project but I guess they are also still funded by the European Commission and will continue working together after the Otostem project will end.