It sure looks like it. According to this, the company has dosed 200 people thus far with success. Their measurement for hearing improvement is improvement in speech perception.

Clearly, this tech is still several years (at least a decade?) off, but the fact that they have finally made some progress in this area is astounding.

Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

MIT spinout Frequency Therapeutics’ drug candidate stimulates the growth of hair cells in the inner ear.

Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy31

The MIT spinout Frequency Therapeutics uses a new kind of druggable regenerative therapy that targets progenitor cells to create hair cells of the inner ear and reverse hearing loss.

Most of us know someone affected by hearing loss, but we may not fully appreciate the hardships that lack of hearing can bring. Hearing loss can lead to isolation, frustration, and a debilitating ringing in the ears known as tinnitus. It is also closely correlated with dementia.

The biotechnology company Frequency Therapeutics is seeking to reverse hearing loss — not with hearing aids or implants, but with a new kind of regenerative therapy. The company uses small molecules to program progenitor cells, a descendant of stem cells in the inner ear, to create the tiny hair cells that allow us to hear.

Hair cells die off when exposed to loud noises or drugs including certain chemotherapies and antibiotics. Frequency’s drug candidate is designed to be injected into the ear to regenerate these cells within the cochlea. In clinical trials, the company has already improved people’s hearing as measured by tests of speech perception — the ability to understand speech and recognize words.

“Speech perception is the No. 1 goal for improving hearing and the No. 1 need we hear from patients,” says Frequency co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Chris Loose PhD ’07.

In Frequency’s first clinical study, the company saw statistically significant improvements in speech perception in some participants after a single injection, with some responses lasting nearly two years.

The company has dosed more than 200 patients to date and has seen clinically meaningful improvements in speech perception in three separate clinical studies. Another study failed to show improvements in hearing compared to the placebo group, but the company attributes that result to flaws in the design of the trial.

Now Frequency is recruiting for a 124-person trial28 from which preliminary results should be available early next year.

Well I’ll believe it when I hear it, remember they can’t even find a “cure” for baldness, growing “hair” seems to be illusive, I mean elusive.

A friend was a senior member of the staff at frequencytx, and he’s been let go. He’s taking a break before he finds new work, but he had interesting comments about how deceptive the human interactions with hearing tests are. People were scoring better in hearing tests because they wanted it to be true that they could hear better. But there was no statistical difference between those treated with real deal and those treated with placebos. The leader of their testing thought it was going very well for them because a significant number of people had improvements when tested. But he wasn’t aware of who was in the placebo part and who received the real treatment.

I found it interesting that when my friend put two and two together to realize I had hearing issues and was aware of their testing trials, he said he wanted me to keep him completely ignorant of if I entered the trials.

WH