New possibilities for hearing restoration

 An international team of researchers has developed a new method to deliver drugs into the inner ear. The discovery was possible by harnessing the natural flow of fluids in the brain and employing a little understood backdoor into the cochlea. When combined to deliver a gene therapy that repairs inner ear hair cells, the researchers were able to restore hearing in deaf mice.

“These findings demonstrate that cerebrospinal fluid transport comprises an accessible route for gene delivery to the adult inner ear and may represent an important step towards using gene therapy to restore hearing in humans,” said Maiken Nedergaard, MD, DMSc, senior author of the new study, which appears in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Nedergaard is co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at University of Rochester and the University of Copenhagen. The study was the product of a collaboration between researchers at the two universities and a group led by Barbara Canlon, Ph.D. in the Laboratory of Experimental Audiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

By University of Rochester Medical Center

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230628201318.htm