Working on a Drug to Stimulate Regeneration of Lost Hair Cells in the Inner Ear

One class of the numerous forms of age-related deafness is caused by loss of hair cells in the inner ear. These cells are a necessary part of the chain of systems that leads from sound outside the body to signals passing along nerves into the brain for interpretation. As these hair cells are lost, so is hearing capacity. A range of efforts to reverse this loss are underway at various stages of development, such as reprogramming a cell sample into patient-matched hair cells, or, as in this case, finding ways to provoke regeneration in situ, changing cellular behavior so that they rebuild where they would normally not do so. Within the inner ear, thousands of hair cells detect sound waves and translate them into nerve signals. Each of us is born with about 15,000 hair cells per ear, and once damaged, these cells cannot regrow. Noise exposure, aging, and some antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs can lead to hair cell death. In some animals, those cells naturally regenerate, but not in humans. However, researchers have now discovered a combination of drugs that expands the population of progenitor cells (also called supporting cells) in the ear and induces them to become hair cells, offering a potential new way to treat hearing loss. The research team began investigating the possibility of regenerating hair cells during an earlier study on cells of the intestinal lining. In that study, researchers reported that they could generate large quantities of immature intest...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs