A team of Mass Eye and Ear researchers in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories have been awarded a five-year, $12.5 million P50 Clinical Research Center Grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicable Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue their research on cochlear synaptopathy, or hidden hearing loss, a type of hearing damage first discovered at Mass Eye and Ear in 2009.
Researchers at Uppsala University have created the “first 3D map of the hearing nerve showing where the various sound frequencies are captured,” according to an article on the university's website. Using what is known as synchrotron X-ray imaging, they were able to trace the fine nerve threads and the vibrating auditory organ, the cochlea, and find out exactly how the frequencies of incoming sound are distributed.
To achieve reprogramming, the scientists exposed fibroblasts and supporting cells to a cocktail of four transcription factors, which are molecules that help convey the instructions encoded in DNA. The scientists identified this cocktail by testing various combinations of 16 transcription factors that were highly active in the hair cells of newborn mice.
Using a zebrafish model, researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have found that artemisinin, an anti-malarial drug, may help treat forms of hereditary hearing and vision loss associated with clarin1 mutations like Usher syndrome.
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Using a zebrafish model, researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have found that artemisinin, an anti-malarial drug, may help treat forms of hereditary hearing and vision loss associated with clarin1 mutations like Usher syndrome.
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The book describes major advances in our understanding of the pathogenic processes underlying various forms of hearing loss and the emergence of treatments for deafness.
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Fettiplace, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health (UW SMPH), won the award for showing how cochlear hair cells sense the tiny mechanical vibrations that sound produces in the inner ear.
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After accounting for the risk factors of age at diagnosis and treatment intensity, the analysis suggested that survivors with severe hearing loss struggled the most with slowed processing speed and phonological skills.
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To identify new molecules involved in hearing loss, the researchers took a genetic approach and created 1,211 new mouse mutants. They screened each of these mice using a sensitive electrophysiological test, the auditory brainstem response, to find out how good their hearing was.
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The auditory receptors of the inner ear, called hair cells, pick up sounds using a vibration-sensing antenna called the hair bundle. While much research into hearing loss has focused on the hair bundle, UVA’s discovery spotlights the foundations those antennas stand on.
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The researcher’s new work reveals the identity and mechanism of a finely-tuned spring they believe is responsible for converting the deflection of hair cells into a force capable of opening ion channels.
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The contest challenged children from around the world aged 6-12 years old to create an invention to improve the quality of life for people living with hearing loss.
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A team led by Professor Karen B. Avraham, vice dean of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, has now created the first map of “methylation”–one of the body’s main epigenetic signals–that reflects the functioning of the inner ear in its entirety.
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The research, conducted by researchers from Oticon and Interacoustics on an international team, revealed another function in the inner ear that detects the acoustic details in speech before it is converted into information for the brain.
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These preclinical data, demonstrating the potential of intratympanic BDNF to repair cochlear synaptopathy—an underlying cause of hearing loss including speech-in-noise hearing difficulty—are being presented as part of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Annual Meeting in San Diego, November 3-7, 2018.
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By administering an experimental chemical—identified in a separate UCSF lab in 2013—that acts on the pathway linking this gene to hearing loss, they found that they could prevent noise-induced deafness in the mice.
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The paper “Pioglitazone represents an effective therapeutic target in preventing oxidative/inflammatory cochlear damage induced by noise exposure” was published in “Frontiers in Pharmacology.”
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The researchers were able recreate the development of human hair cells via an in-vitro method in the laboratory. As a result, future research may allow pharmacological treatments to be tested on human cells.
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