"It's the first time anyone has biologically repaired the hearing of animals," says Yehoash Raphael at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and head of the US-Japanese team that developed the technique.
The therapy promotes the regrowth of crucial hair cells in the cochlea, the part of the inner ear which registers sound. After treatment, the researchers used sensory electrodes around the animals' heads to show that the auditory nerves of treated - but not untreated - animals were now registering sound.
And the article makes a point about cochlear implant users.
Raphael says one future possibility would be to use the therapy to improve hearing in people who already wear cochlear implants. These electrical devices are of some help to people lacking hair cells, but the regrowth of even some hairs could boost their hearing further. Raphael says that the next experiments in guinea pigs will focus on this combination.
Scientists have to destroy the animals hearing in the first place to test the procedure:
Raphael's team first gave the guinea pigs antibiotics which destroyed their inner-ear hair cells. They then apparently repaired the damage by injecting them with genetically engineered adenoviruses.
The viruses had been engineered to be harmless while also smuggling a gene called Atoh1 into cells lining the scala media - the key chamber of the cochlea, containing the hair cells. Atoh1, also known as Math1, makes a signalling molecule known to orchestrate the development of hair cells in embryos.
The experiment worked beyond expectation. "The recovery of hair cells brought the treated ears to between 50% and 80% of their original hearing thresholds," says Raphael. Even more surprising, the team found that the hair cells were created from cells lining the scala media which, according to biological orthodoxy - should not be able to turn into other cells.
Read the rest of the article. Quite exciting. We can expect major changes in how people's deafness will be treated biologically in the next 10 years where hearing can finally be restored/repaired. People will have a CHOICE whether to have this procedure or not. But first off, it'll be easier for parents of deaf children to decide to get this type of treatment. At least 90% of all deaf children have hearing parents. So, when parents do decide to use biological therapy to restore/repair deaf children's hearing a few months after they are born, then they have that right to decide that. This shouldn't be a problem for Deaf culture as long as choice is in the equation. N'est ce pas? Until a law is passed saying that all babies born deaf must have their hearing restored biologically, then certainly Deaf culture will suffer over the long run.
Exciting, isn't it? <-- (don't read too much into this).
No comments:
Post a Comment