“Novartis is now working on a new treatment where a harmless virus carries a gene into the inner ear to stimulate new growth of hair cells.
“Once the virus injects the DNA into the cell it then takes over the cells machinery to make the new protein and that protein will now cause the non-hair cell to become a hair cell,” Lustig said.
Klickstein said that the new gene therapy promises to be much better tolerated and less cumbersome and one day render cochlear implants and hearing aides obsolete.
“What we hope to do with this therapy is restore hearing as normal as possible,” Klickstein said, “no device maintenance, no complications— just normal hearing.”
The treatment was successful in animals and is now being tried in humans. It is promising, but there are stlll obstacles. For one thing, the treatment washes out of the ear, so the effects may be temporary.
“The delivery might be one of the biggest problems we face,” Klickstein said. “The inner ear is encased almost completely in solid bone and getting the gene therapy to the right cells was one of our biggest challenges.”
Otonomy, a biotech company, has invented a gel that is injected into the ear and allows medication to stay in place longer. Experts at Otonomy and Lustig both indicated that they see the treatments being combined to provide a cure. Jay Lichter, founder of Otonomy, told me in an interview that “if you are trying to regrow hair cells for a patient who is already deaf to give them the ability to hear again, you want the drug on board as long as possible so those hair cells continue to regrow and can continue to send signals to the brain that they can hear.”
Lustig said that Big Pharma’s growing interest in the new treatments signals that there is great promise. The goal is to restore hearing without aides or surgery and have the effects last.”