Stem Cells Regrowing Hearing Cells in Mice

May 14th, 2010

Hair cells deep inside the ear that become damaged during hearing may have found a coaxing by stem cells to regrow. While only done so far in mice, Dr. Kazuo Oshima of Stanford University in California and colleagues, experiments with two types of stem cells, raises the possibility of treating many types of deafness and hearing loss according to the journal Cell.

They used two types of master cells to create the mouse hair cells — embryonic stem cells and a similar type of cells called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which are ordinary cells re-programed to act like stem cells.

Both came from mice, and the next step is to try the experiment using human cells. Much better use of time than making cartoons of atv racing mice I would say.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that 15 percent of Americans between 20 and 69, or 26 million people, have high frequency hearing loss caused by noise. Antibiotics and genetic disorders can also damage the hair cells in the middle ear needed for normal hearing.

“What we are thinking is to get human iPS cells from hearing loss patients and just try to re-make the disorder in the petri dish,” Oshima said in a telephone interview.

This could be used to screen drugs that might cause the cells to regenerate, or to activate hibernating stem cells in the ear, he said.

It may also be possible to grow the cells and inject them into the ear, but no one has developed a technique for doing this, Oshima said.

“There are still so many hurdles to overcome,” he said.