Inner Ear Hair Cell Regeneration — Maybe We Can Know More

There is a lot of politics involved.

Stephen Spring - Inner Ear R&D -...

 

If tinnitus is and will be incurable, why are you wasting your precious time in a research forum?

 

We are coming up on the start of Q3 2017. Has anyone heard more from Spiral?

 

http://houghear.org/research/ (At the bottom of the text)

their aim is to be able to obtain FDA approval within the next 3-5 years
Is this a product on the market, Or clinical trial?

 

Market

 

Maybe someone could do a post with all the known biotech corps. listed currently underway for cellular repair of the ear.

 

Yes, BUT they mention the preventive therapy not the regeneration therapy

 

I think we have all reasons to be optimistic. The only thing which is very unclear in many statements of all these companies and researcher.
Could they ever regenerate hair cells in an adult cochlea? Most of the time they speak about embryo or new born..
Does someone know a statement where they claim in an adult cochlea?

 

Thank you. I should really visit more threads on here.

 

Was reading a vestibular implant paper by Fornos & Van De Berg, and look who got a mention. You don't often see language like this used in research articles, but somebody obviously brought it to their attention. They must have been in shock reading it, still subscribing eye exercises from the 1900's for dizziness, so reading Rivolta & Chen must be like alien technology to them.

Source https://www.docdroid.net/W2mckP1/th...the-human-balance-system-2017.pdf.html#page=2

 

Prevention is what i understand as far as it has to do with the trials

 

I still don't get some companies whole antioxidant push. Why are they taking so much time to produce something that is a gloried multivitamin? Whats the payoff a margin improvement over multivitamins for a treatment that you have to apply within the first couple hours of noise damage. Its a kinda rhetorical question cause I know they will sell this to US military. But it just doesn't seem that ground breaking or useful imho.

 

That's pharma for you. They will simply fail over and over again. Just sit back and laugh.

 

I think it is, unfortunately its not suitable for the majority of us inside here but it will be for sure a step forward, i just wish they will focus more on regeneration therapies

Ps. It just happens that i did get my acoustic trauma during my military service and during that time i had to deal with lots of them among the stuff as a doctor, believe me its really common and unfortunate among them

 

I don't doubt it and understand that servicemen experience true suffering from tinnitus. My point is that the antioxidant route is not the most useful route for hearing damage. You need to either provide and ingest/get dosed with it prior to noise damage or very very shortly after. If you are going to anticipate noise damage (say shooting range) then people should be forced to wear earmuffs over earplugs. If noise damage is going to be unexpected then it might cause logistical problems accessing the medicine if the person was say in the field. Also the improvement factor is by definition limited.

I get that antioxidants are a lot easier to make then regeneration techniques but its also less practical and by definition not tremendously effective in real life.

so I'm not sure it is clear that its a step forward.

 

Look at Antinitus, they had some approval that made their product believable.

Antinitus or Banana?

 

Does anyone know if it's possible for stereocilia to be damaged by noise but the cell structures themselves live on, despite this damage? I hope not, as I worry that the distortions I have in my hearing may be because of damaged rather than lost cells (that could potentially be replaced with a regenerative therapy)

 

The distortions i guess are what we call recruitment right? I have it also much less now after two months from my acoustic trauma but i hope its gonna get better

 

I have heard different opinions on this. What you mean: is there sufficient cellular architecture post lesion for functional recovery of the organ. It is the 64 thousand dollar question. In severe acute neuritis of the vestibular organ, sometimes the disconnected canals begin to disintegrate a few months thereafter and the debris falls into the remaining functional canal causing secondary positional vertigo. Loose otoconia are also theorized to be a cause of menieres where the debris might clog up the various drainage systems of the ear.

Can saccular otoconia cause...

Whats interesting is that post postmortems often reveal different levels of remaining function. If the damage is localised to HC's themselves say for instance aminoglycoside poisoning you would theoretically still have fully functioning nerves under each, just with no sensory cell information to be passed down through the ganglion. But say it was a blunt trauma or a compression like a schwannomma this would essentially be an ischemic type injury that starves the ear cells of oxygenated blood, I have read in the literature before that a glass pipette placed over the primary vascular supply to the superior vestibular nerve (in mouse) for just 10 seconds can cause irreversible damage to the organ, so like the eye, the ear is "extremely" oxygen hungry. What we need is non invasive imaging of the ear that can show microscopic damage. What we need, is a time machine!

 

Yes we must appreciate what remains in our ears for now.
Do have a listen to this chap, he studies mechanotransduction and thinks we have greatly underestimated the capabilities of the ear. He does not think in straight lines.

Human Hearing - Theory & Discussion with...

 

I know this has been asked a billion times but, are we close? I don't want the "every day we draw closer" answer. I mean are we *really* close. Like, within 5 years?

Also, if a cure is found and someone who has tinnitus has it reduce drastically or even disappear all together could that person be exposed to loud noise again and have loud noticeable tinnitus again? Would they be able to use the cure again? How would that even work?

 

I understand recruitment is quite rare. You can find sound-bites on the internet to recognise recruitment. Provided you still have one "good" ear like I have.
I also experience distortion. (not recruitment). My noise trauma happened over two years ago. I still experience this distortion, but at higher sound levels than , lets say, one year ago. So even after more than one year post trauma I experience small improvement. When I make a very rough guess, I think it happens with sound levels over 70 dB. Very rough guess, because it is also very frequency dependent.

 

Thats also my case, high dbs and i notice, lower and not so much

 

In order to hit the 5 year mark we are looking at a clinical trial beginning now and being successful. The general consensus is the Genvec trials are not going to pan out. Right now you have Frequency Therapeutics and Audion beginning clinical trials within 12 months or so. If they are successful then yes 5 years.

My advice at this point would be to try and carry on with your life knowing that we will have something in 10 to 20 years, but I think 5 is pushing it.

If you T is due to hearing loss and hearing is restored there is a lot of evidence that suggests T could go away or at least be minimally invasive at that point.

If they get your hearing fixed and you damage it again due to a loud noise, T will return. Theoretically with Frequency you could use the cure again since they don't use up your supporting cells. Each cure will be different so one that uses up your supporting cells, you may not be able to do again, but even then they could come out with something else.

 

I don't mean to sound so pessimistic. I'm sorry for the suffering we're all going through. Life shouldn't be like this for any of us. I come here for hope just like everyone else. When you read all the research mentioned in these posts it's pretty clear that there is still a great deal unknown. The Genvec trials have been unsuccessful so far and they're only testing it on profoundly deaf candidates anyway. The frequency treatment is aimed at chronic hearing loss. Even if they are both successful these treatments will most likely only be available to people with severe hearing loss first.

Since most people with T usually have mild loss or even no loss there's simply no way they would try these treatments on them. Most of us here would need a much more precise treatment that could target the specific haircells we have lost or damaged ( assuming that's even the cause of your T). Birds can actually do this and regenerate the specific haircells lost like a new tooth sprouting up. We need to get that ability transfered to the human cochlea somehow.

We also need a ton of money and research put into this to accelerate the progress which is being made. All we can do is remain hopeful that these trials will be successful and some good insight gained from it. The treatments will need to be refined much further before they can be used for T or mild loss though. How long that takes is completely unknown at this stage. I'd like to believe it will be sooner rather than later but I'm sure we'd all agree that it's not going fast enough.