Deafness: a new treatment to regain hearing

In your entourage, you certainly know people whose hearing has deteriorated. If this can cause some inconvenience for those around you (speaking louder, increasing the volume of the television, etc.), it can also be a factor of confinement for people who suffer from this disorder.

Currently, the solutions are mainly limited to medical devices to be placed in the ear. But a new solution, based on a new type of regenerative therapy, could emerge.

The company Frequency Therapeutics, in connection with MIT, is working on a treatment to fight against deafness. The first published clinical trial is encouraging. Among the 200 volunteers, the researchers “seen clinically significant improvements in speech perception in three separate clinical trials”, the company said in a press release.

“Some of these people [dans les essais] couldn’t hear for 30 years, and for the first time they said they could walk into a crowded restaurant and hear what their children were saying”reports MIT Institute professor Robert Langer.

Inject the treatment directly into the ear

This treatment targets the hair cells present in the inner ear. These are essential for good hearing. However, “humans are born with approximately 15,000 hair cells in each cochlea. These cells die over time and never regenerate.”, explains the biotechnology company. The company’s objective is to allow these cells to regenerate by injecting the drug into the ear. Specialists believe that their approach, based on the injection of a treatment to regenerate cells, has an advantage over gene therapy treatments which involve extracting cells from a patient, programming them in the laboratory, then transporting them to the correct area.

“Tissues in your body contain progenitor cells, so we see a huge range of applications”conclude the researchers who are working on another treatment to treat multiple sclerosis.