Human Inner Ear Organs Grown: Could Lead to New Therapies for Hearing, Balance Impairments

I apologize if this has already been posted, but I found this a very interesting article. something that again will lead us on the way to a cure / treatment. Every little bit puts us a step closer!

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170502161029.htm

 

I don't actually think that you guys know how big this is. As it says in the article "now we can test drugs in a way that the human ear responds to things, and not test animal". That will allow for huge progress and speed of the development of potential medicines, because they can see if they work so much faster.

 

It (and their earlier work) has been posted. It's clearly important. However, you have to remember what you have linked to is a press release so of course it sounds great.

 

If I recall correctly Indiana is covered in this press release, but St. Jude's has also done it, Harvard too, some university in China. Basically there's been a push to research regeneration of haircells ever since we discovered chickens do so in the 80s.

Nearly every medical school across the country has been studying how to regrow haircells. (Was interested to see University of Mississippi researching that)

These labs successfully regrowing cochlear haircells are the culmination of decades of research. Expect to see more labs successfully regrow haircells.

 

Great news so far. I read about them 5 years ago when they started. It's always very exciting to see, that things are really developing.

 

There's a difference between growing hair cells and growing inner ear organoids. Hashino and Koehler at IU and Holt at Harvard been the leaders in this. I'm not aware of research from St. Jude or from China growing organoids.

The important development in this paper is the ability to generate multiple organoids. Scaling up is a good thing.

As far as I know, they have not - in their published work at least - grown organoids with functioning cochlear hair cells, only vestibular hair cells. Maybe in the next paper....

 

Yes, because organoids are supporting cell structures. I believe with this, they should not only be able to test hair cell regrowth, but also be able to see how different medicines will react and function on the ear, before actually going to clinical trials. This would Making searching for a cure / treatment a more targeted event.

 

I am sorry! In the last post i was referring to organoids, but It should have been organelles (supporting cell structures). Obviously that is not what they are talking here about.