Frequency Therapeutics — Hearing Loss Regeneration

This is a pretty good example of result/progress I think:

"The hair cells in this picture are regenerated hair cells from our own lab..."



From the Hough Ear Institute Facebook page posted in February this year.

 

A skin cancer diagnosis and recovery story of one of Frequency’s founders, Jeff Karp:

Harvard scientist's 'doorknob' question leads to skin cancer diagnosis

 

The thing about growing something, it needs to connect to nerves and brain stem, it's more complicated than just growing hair cells.

 

Well I suppose that if the body detects that there is something new, it connects it.

 

That's what's interesting about FX-322 / Progenitor Cell Activation. In vitro, Frequency has observed the output of PCA where a new daughter cell (hair cell) is create with a nerve. While it cannot be observed in vivo in the cochlea, they have observed a signal via improvements in word recognition tests. Therefore, the conclusion thus far has been that the regrown hair cells are establishing a signal with the brain, resulting in improved word scores.

 

Chad, are you seeing FREQ starting to move a little? Almost at two bucks now. Let's hope it keeps going...

 

Yea, hopefully it will slowly keep climbing as we get closer to phase 2 results. The fall all the way to $1 wasn't quite organic because a couple of the large institutions unloaded their positions the last couple months and that drove it down quite a bit.

DBTX released positive data and doubled since then so hopefully we can crawl back up to $3 or $4 before results and see a double up from there.

 

That's a little odd to me. At least looking at their website, DBTX looks way less along than FREQ. The Pipeline section says that they've yet to reach Phase 2 on a single one of their products. It seems super risky to gamble on just Phase 1 results. All that proves is that it isn't going to kill a human, it can essentially be sugar water otherwise.

I don't do a lot with stocks personally. Still though, the riskiness of it is something quite alarming to me.

 

Does anyone know if there is an age limit for the potential efficacy of these treatments? I'll be 60 this year, and I keep being told that hearing loss (and tinnitus) is age-related. By the time this product actually is available, commercially, I could be pushing 65.

Is that too late???

 

Let's hope so...

 

Check out the inclusion/exclusion criteria:

FX-322 in Adults With Acquired Sensorineural Hearing Loss

 

It's not well understood. You can't quite point to the exclusion criteria in the trial to know for sure; that criteria is to ensure the trial participants are reliable in placebo effect / drug response.

 

Phase 1 is a safety trial but that doesn't stop them from conducting efficacy tests at the same time and they showed some pretty promising results with 87% of subjects showing some level of hearing protection from the ototoxic drugs.

 

I didn't read the 87% result. Goodness that'd be welcome news for sure.

 

Age won't be a factor in restoring hearing. Lots of seniors have good hearing so clearly loss in hearing has many other factors than age, including noise over the years and medications.

 

Thanks! I may just get in under the wire...

 

Scientists from King’s College London, the Karolinska Institute, and Erasmus University have recently discovered ten additional genes connected to hearing loss, and located the part of the ear affected.

The results, which were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics on May 16th, 2022, put doubt on the notion that age-related hearing loss is primarily caused by sensory hair cells. The stria vascularis, a region of the cochlea in the ear, is a new target for medicines to aid patients with hearing loss, according to researchers.​

New Hope for Hearing Loss Treatment: Researchers Identify 48 Genes Linked to Hearing Loss

Found this and thought it was interesting. It seems that for some people it isn't a question of regenerating or reviving hair cells to bring hearing back.

 

FREQ is running hot. It's up 135% in the last 45 days. Let's go FREQ...

 

What's coming in medicine are things we can't conceive of. We're not experts in the field. I wonder if there'll be a CRISPR program for hearing loss. You get tinnitus or hearing loss. They take your DNA, run the program, and then you'll come back for the mRNA edit and you're closer to "normal" than the onset. Or maybe this can just turn off the noises everyone hears.

They knew it in the 70s... Wow. We're so fortunate to live in the time of a major boom of science.

 

FREQ up 16% today so far. Is there new info out there or is it just ultra small cap weirdness?

 

Hopefully some positive info has leaked. The stock is up 135% in the last two months.

 

This lines up with FREQ's age-related hearing loss trial, they did not see a robust response in that trial which also suggests age-related hearing loss is not caused by sensory hair cells.

The share price run up has been on large volume, I'd speculate that institutions are getting back in now after having taken their tax losses and stayed out for 30 days in order to avoid a wash sale.

 

It would be prudent to see some 13-F filings to find out if it’s retail driven or institutional driven. Not sure where or when to find them. Can anyone help us out?

If the institutions are showing up, we have a signal from the noise. Nothing guaranteed, but if they’re betting heavy, we might have at least one treatment getting closer to reality

 

Most of the buying is from us here as similiar to when someone post a low price stock on the member only stock thread. Institutional and hedge funds have not been the major players this time around - there has been some front loading. Whenever someone here posts positive hope, price jumps. Some posters post on other stock message boards, but that does not increase price.

 

What positive news have we heard recently?

 

Does anyone know yet why subject 5 got a lot worse from baseline after the shot?

 

You can damage your hearing by noise exposure pretty easily afterwards, so just because you regain something, that doesn't mean you can't damage it again.

 

I hope that would be the reason and it's nothing to do with FX-322.

 

I wonder if the presence of the inhibitor protein is actually preventing the new hair cells from properly rooting into their replacement. I imagine the body may be perceiving some of these new hair cells as tumors or similar and the protein being produced is doing its job and stopping them.

It's troubling to imagine because of the potential of inner ear cancer as a result but regeneration may not be fruitful unless the gene and/or protein is suppressed while the hair cells fully integrate into the cochlea.

 

That's interesting. Anything foreign to the body is normally attacked, be it pathogen, chemical or whatnot. We see this in transplant patients due to the part being very minimally different at cellular level.