Prof. Thanos Tzounopoulos Receives $2 Million Grant

Then this allows Sound Pharmaceuticals to get the treatment out and also enables them to not necessarily need to put this through clinical trials for other indications.

 

Tinnitus.

 

Have they actually begun the Phase 3 for Meniere's? I couldn't find it on ClinicalTrials.gov. Seems like they're going full steam with the two phase 2 COVID-19 trials which, if on track still, should be done by the end of this year.

 

Is that a fact?

 

Yes, but not everyone reaches receptor tolerance and in some people it takes years to decades.

Also: if you ever withdrawal from taking benzos taper very, very slowly under a (knowledgeable) doctor's care to minimize rebound tinnitus (sometimes severe). This forum is filled with horror stories, unfortunately.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7213946/

https://www.benzo.org.uk/busto.htm

 

How does tinnitus get rebound?

 

I know that they are absolutely going ahead with the COVID-19 relief treatment trials.

However, I am actually not sure about the Meniere's trial. The information I was going off of was what had been provided to me by other users. Even if Sound Pharmaceuticals aren't presently going through the phase 3 trials for Meniere's, it probably won't matter if they get approval for the COVID-19 use. This is because Sound Pharmaceuticals would have the approval for the treatment, then doctors could simply prescribe this treatment off-label for Meniere's.

 

Benzo withdrawal symptoms (and there are a plethora of them) in general are caused by receptor tolerance or lack of receptor stimulation.

Dr. Heather Ashton in the UK who was one of the world's benzo withdrawal experts before she passed away described tinnitus, sometimes very severe as a common symptom of benzo withdrawal.

How it appears to relate to tinnitus is that there are GABA receptors on outer hair cells themselves that help attenuate the glutamate release from sound stimuli. It's easy to imagine impairment of these would impede that attenuation.

But early on that attenuation effect is why it can be very effective.

Not everyone obviously gets benzo withdrawal symptoms but it is a known risk and tinnitus worsening is part of that risk.

 

It was mentioned to me that the tweaked Retigabine was going to be trialled in Australia next.

Can anyone enlighten me as to whether this is true, and if so, when and where please?

 

Well, at least I know what not to use for my tinnitus. Thanks for the info.

 

Hi @DebInAustralia, I've asked Dr. Tzounopoulos about possible trials in Australia and elsewhere, but he couldn't say where it would take place. The mail that I've received from him, below, dates March the 5th, 2020.

________________________________________________________________________________
Sorry to learn of you tinnitus

Hope you feel better soon

We are currently performing preclinical testing

Once this is successfully completed, we will move to clinical trials

Not sure where the clinical trial will take place

RL-81 was designed to treat noise-induced tinnitus in mice.

RL-81 was designed to treat the brain after noise-induced tinnitus;

so it could work even if the auditory nerve is damaged

Thank you for your kind words.

 

I wish we could glean tolerance/withdrawal proclivity genetically like we can do for anti depressant response... just another example of being born too early with this crap.

 

I have wondered if there is a way to do this.

Maybe if the people with known withdrawal problems sent their genome to 23andMe and then uploaded it to Promethease and looked at their GABA receptor genes, it might point to clues in the most obvious genes (of course there are going to be many other genetic cofactors too). You would need a large sample size.

 

I hope this is so, and soon. I've been trying to get into a study for some time since I learned on how to do so, but have been unsuccessful so far. Doesn't help that most of them are U.S based.