Inner Ear Hair Cell Regeneration — Maybe We Can Know More

Man, if we all got tinnitus in 2030, we could choose our treatments from a menu card.

 

Haggling for the best price.

 

Unsure if this has been posted already. From 3 March
https://endpts.com/hear-hear-ear-gene-therapy-player-akouos-draws-105m-in-fresh-capital/

$105 million in Series B funding for Akouos.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sensorion-provides-sens-401-ssnhl-063000237.html

Delays in recruitment as a result of COVID-19. Wonder how this sort of thing bodes for the likes of Frequency...

 

Strekin AG Completes Phase 3 Clinical Study of STR001 to Restore Hearing in Patients with SSNHL

Strekin AG, a Swiss-based biopharmaceutical company focused on developing new treatments to reverse hearing loss, has completed its Phase 3 clinical trial of the investigational drug STR001 in patients with Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss (SSNHL).

If the results are promising, STR001 could become the first approved treatment for SSNHL patients.

Source:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03331627?type=Intr

 

This is good news for acute cases but, unfortunately, it isn't useful for chronic cases.

 

Do they have a website?

 

Awesome news but, correct me if I'm wrong, this drug is only effective for noise induced hearing loss acquired in a 96 hour timeline. So extremely acute cases.

I got really excited as I haven't heard of this company or drug and completing phase 3 sounds really promising. But I'm nearing a year into tinnitus from noise induced hearing loss.

 

Since the trial is over I wonder if anyone on here was a participant and has any news.

 

This looks great!

 

Is this only for hearing loss in the acute stage?

 

Completed phase 3 trial sounds like they have made it quite far. Why it is only for the acute cases? Looks like some hearing regeneration drug as FX-322.

 

It's not a regenerative drug. It's an anti-oxidant that prevents acute injury from leading to permanent damage.

And from their trial inclusion requirements from clinicaltrials.gov:

Inclusion Criteria:

1. Male or female patients aged ≥ 18
2. Patients with a SSHL within 96 hours of its perception

Within 96 hours is for very acute cases.

 

What are those acute cases?

 

Acute means the treatment happens in a short time after the symptom onset. In his case, this drug is designed to help but only if given within 96 hours of the hearing loss.

 

"SSHNL may be caused by surgery, acoustic trauma, or sudden deafness, a phenomenon in which hearing loss occurs without obvious cause. Further symptoms may include ringing in the ears (tinnitus) and dizziness (vertigo)."

Tinnitus included as a symptom...

Website:
https://www.strekin.com/company/scientific-experts.html

Contact:
Alexander Bausch,
CEO, Strekin AG
Email: Alexander.Bausch@strekin.com

 

More promising research on auditory nerve regeneration: https://stemcellsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/stem.3181
Albert Edge is one of the authors.
Lin-28 reprograms inner ear glia to a neuronal fate: possibility of a new avenue for regeneration that could replace dying neurons in auditory neuropathy.

 

But how could the auditory nerve be damaged? Only through acoustic neuroma, some drug or maybe some badly run surgery. Probably most have tinnitus and hyperacusis noise induced and so fixing hair cells would be enough. And these new approaches FX-322, Audion, HEI don't seem to use stem cells which is even better because I think the cancer problem with stem cells was never solved.

 

I assume this could have implications for cochlear synaptopathy.

 

Okay, so someone with perfectly fine audiogram nevertheless having tinnitus and hyperacusis might suffer from cochlear synaptopathy and the hearing regeneration drugs might not have any positive effect at all since there is no major loss of hair cells. I hope they make some progress also in diagnostic tests to check what's actually damaged in our ears.

 

This seems like it would be especially good news for those with Auto-immune auditory neuropathies.

OTO-413, and Hough pill are both synaptopathy drugs. PIPE-505 in pre-clinical is also.

Hair cell regeneration drugs will not effect cochlear synaptopathy but synapse regeneration drugs should.

But agree, better diagnostics are sorely needed.

 

Which do you feel is the most promising of these three and why?

 

Truthfully I am not sure. The Hough pill maybe because it also seems to produce more neurite outgrowth but I am not sure how to tell who needs that and who doesn't.

 

Add FX-322 to this list also.

 

Does FX-322 also help with cochlear synaptopathy? What is definitely on the positive side for the Hough pill and Pipeline is that they explicitly mention tinnitus. Hopefully they receive enough funding to push these drugs through the clinical trial phases, so that we have not years of endless waiting ahead of us.

 

It's not a synaptopathy drug specifically but, as far as we know, it does restore the synapse *if* its corresponding hair cell is damaged.

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378111920303462?via=ihub

 

I just came across this post from Action on Hearing Loss.
https://www.actiononhearingloss.org...auditory-nerve-underlies-hidden-hearing-loss/
Researchers at UCL were looking into developing diagnostic tests for hidden hearing loss/cochlear synaptopathy. This project spanned Feb 2016-2019. I know the issue of inadequate diagnostics gets brought up a lot on this forum - I'll investigate and see if there's any news as to what came out of it.

EDIT: Okay so this project is still listed under currently funded projects and is dated 2017-20.

 

They seem to be using synaptopathy and neuropathy interchangeably there unless that's just how Action on Hearing Loss is reporting it.

 

Yeah that's actually something that I noticed and I'm a bit confused as some sources seem to use these phrases interchangeably but I think there's some distinction between them?