New possibilities for hearing restoration.
Posted by giorgiobertin on June 30, 2023
An international team of researchers has developed a new method of delivering drugs into the inner ear. The discovery was made by exploiting the natural flow of fluids in the brain and employing a little-known backdoor in 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 results demonstrate that CSF transport comprises an accessible pathway for gene delivery to the adult inner ear and may represent an important step toward using gene therapy to restore hearing in humans.said Maiken Nedergaard, MD, DMSc, senior author of the new study, which appears in the journalScience Translational Medicine“.
In the new study, the researchers describe a little-known passage in the cochlea called cochlear aqueductThis is a thin bony canal no bigger than a single strand of hair. Suspected of playing a role in balancing pressure in the ear, the new study shows that the cochlear aqueduct also serves as a conduit between the cerebrospinal fluid found in the inner ear and the rest of the brain.
By employing a range of imaging and modeling technologies, the researchers were able to develop a detailed portrait of how fluid from other parts of the brain flows through the cochlear aqueduct and into the inner ear.
The team then injected an adeno-associated virus into the cisterna magna, a large reservoir of cerebrospinal fluid found at the base of the skull. The virus made its way into the inner ear via the cochlear aqueduct, delivered a gene therapy that expresses a protein called vesicular glutamate transporter-3, which allows hair cells to transmit signals, and saved hearing in mice deaf adults.
Read the full text of the article:
Delivery of gene therapy through a cerebrospinal fluid conduit to rescue hearing in adult mice.
Barbara K. Mathiesen, Leo M. Miyakoshi, Christopher R. Cederroth, Evangelia Tserga, Corstiaen Versteegh, Peter AR Bork, Natalie L. Hauglund, Ryszard Stefan Gomolka, Yuki Mori, Niklas K. Edvall, Stephanie Rouse, Kjeld Møllgård, Jeffrey R.; .Holt, Maiken Nedergaard, Barbara Canlon.
Science Translational Medicine, 2023; 15 (702) DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abq3916
Source: University of Rochester Medical Center
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This entry was posted on giugno 30, 2023 a 6:34 am and is filed under News-search. Marked by tags: biotechnology, genetics, neurology, otolaryngology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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