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Regrowing Hairs in Ear Canal for Hearing Improvement

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NY Times had article stating that scientists are studying how to do this in mammals, thus leading way to hearing improvement. Anyone have more information on this. Seems like this could be quite some time in the future.

George R.

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Frequency Therapeutics should report on their Phase 1/2 study in January. Regain Hearing Project moves to Phase 2 in January.

Hi George. As Neville pointed out it’s hair cells (not actual hairs) in the cochlea. Google on these terms:

hair cell regeneration, Frequency Therapeutics, Regain Hearing Project, Albert Ellis, Hough Institute, Hearing Health Foundation. That’s just to start with.

You hear wildly different forecasts as to when a treatment might become available. Ranges from a couple of years to decades. Some people around here will say ‘never’, which is fair enough because we’ve been fed news of ‘breakthroughs’ for years. I think it will happen. I’m just hoping I’ve got enough supporting cells left to work on when it does.

What I’m still not clear on is what is the perceptual effect of losing those supporting cells. It’s not like they do nothing. Tough thing to ask a mouse. “Mr. Whiskers, how does how you hear now compare to how you heard before?”

That being said, cochlear implants offer a completely new sort of signal to the brain and the brain eventually reinterprets it to sound normal, so perhaps we can assume that that would happen in this case, too.

In reply to @Neville

@Neville said:

What I’m still not clear on is what is the perceptual effect of losing those supporting cells. It’s not like they do nothing. Tough thing to ask a mouse. “Mr. Whiskers, how does how you hear now compare to how you heard before?”

I should think that would be easy. At different volumes, make a sound like a cat. Observe mouse’s response. :rofl:

It must depend why those hair cells in the cochlea were lost in the first place. For many it will be noise exposure. But there are lots of other mechanisms. For example I have otosclerosis in both ears, which causes a conductive loss, but as well as the excessive ossification around the stapes, I have it in the otic capsule too and this causes high frequency hearing loss. Clearing that damaging bone growth out of the way would be a whole other problem besides getting the hair cells to regenerate. So I doubt that people with my sort of hearing loss are going to benefit at all, even if a means to make hair cells regrow is found.

David I agree with you. Also those with congenital profound loss, I doubt those will regrow either.

Even my surgeon was very cautious when talking to me about going bilateral CI. He couldn’t even give me anything positive about going bilateral as 7+ decades is an awful long time not using those few hair cells remaining.

Neville no I’m still . It’s been over 7 decades since my left ear hasn’t heard much in the way of high frequencies. Hence why I’m very hesitant to go Bilateral.

Ah, yeah I would have been very interested in your experience if you had chosen to go that way. It’s not actually completely clear that unilateral auditory deprivation is the same as bilateral auditory deprivation. It might be. But the auditory system gets input from both sides very quickly–it’s not completely out of the question that input from one side may keep things active enough to support the other side, at least paritally.

But if you’re still getting some richness from your hearing aid side, I’d hesitate too. There are some nice benefits to being .

Neville my L ear is congenital, born 7 weeks prem, I’ve had profound loss all my life, never heard high frequencies in this ear. Would you still expect to get a reasonable result from a in this ear?

I will no doubt eventually have to go down this CI road again sometime in the future.

@Deaf_piper said:

Would you still expect to get a reasonable result from a CI in this ear?

Hm. No, maybe not. I read an article a while back looking at outcomes for implantation in single-sided deafness (other ear normal hearing) of varying lengths. They had a handful of cases out to about 10 years of deafness and while there was a general trend towards poorer outcomes the longer the deafness, I was surprised at the variability. That is, there was a participant who’d been deaf for 7 years who had very good outcomes (80% word rec), although they were a bit of an outliar. However, 10 years is quite different from a lifetime.

This is from an April article.

“Farequency Therapeutics says they’ve already given the treatment to more than 200 people, and seen significant improvements in patients’ hearing in three out of four clinical trials. The therapy is long-lasting – hearing has been improved for nearly two years in some cases – and it comes in the form of a single injection into the inner ear, making it much simpler and quicker than alternatives like gene therapy.”

Hearing Loss Can Be Reversed With New Regenerative Therapy, Say MIT Scientists3

Hearing Loss Can Be Reversed With New Regenerative Therapy, Say MIT Scientists

Ditto @WhiteHat…. So much so, last week my nose and ear trimmer, gave up the ghost and packed in! Most probably died of overwork :rofl: :upside_down_face: :joy:

In reply to @Motion

Wow would I love to be a guinea pig and try out that drug! I’m just curious if it’s JUST the hair cells that are critical for hearing? What if the cochlea was short of liquid? I know I’m in the “congenital cinderblock ears” camp, so maybe there’s no hope for me at 66 yrs old no matter what the treatment. But I still like to daydream about life with NO aids and being able to enjoy water sports while HEARING. :no_mouth:

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