Let's talk hair-replacement therapy. No, I'm not talking about premature baldness, Rogaine or Hair Club for Men. I'm talking about the 15,000 hair-like cells we have in each cochlea at birth that are responsible for translating sound waves from the ear drum into electrical signals the brain can decode as speech, music, a baby crying and all other sounds. When these cells die due to natural aging processes, trauma, or exposure to too much noise or otoxic drugs, we experience sensorineurial hearing loss, the most common form of hearing impairment. Human cochlear hair cells don't regenerate, but a few years ago scientists discovered that they do in birds. Now stem-cell gene researchers are looking for ways to make the hair grow back in humans, too, which could be a potent cure for the most common form of hearing loss. Last year, California voters approved $3 billion in funding for stem-cell research, bucking the President's go-slow approach and instantly making their state a magnet for the world's best stem-cell researchers. This week, Stanford University scored a huge recruiting coup when it stole from Harvard Dr. Stefan Heller, a world-leading researcher investigating stem-cell enabled regeneration of "hearing hair."
Heller, PhD and associate professor of otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School, will join the Stanford Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Heller made headlines the year before last when he published research on an experiment successfully transplanting embryonic hair cells from a mouse into a live chicken embryo, which started growing both chicken and mouse cochlear hair cells. So we should keep an eye on the Golden State for further developments. Heller says a cure for human hearing loss is many years away, but he gives us all some room for hope in an article he wrote last winter for Hearing Health magazine: "With patience and determination, I hope to reach my personal goal, which is to witness a reliable and safe cure for hearing loss during my lifetime."
Posted by David at 10:00 PM on May 26, 2005 in INDUSTRY NEWS, PEOPLE, TECHNOLOGY
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