Development of New Therapies that Stimulate Hair Cell Regeneration
Abstract
One of the primary causes of hearing loss, which is prevalent in military service members, is the death of auditory hair cells(HCs) due to chronic or excessive noise exposure. Since HC regeneration was discovered in non-mammalian vertebrates 35years ago, much progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms that are essential for the transdifferentiation and proliferation of supporting cells. However, this research has failed to translate into clinically meaningful treatments in humans or other mammals which lack the ability to regenerate cochlear HCs. One of the major hurdles is finding appropriate screening models for novel compounds. Previous work has often relied on cell line-based screening, however cell lines fail to accurately represent the complex milieu of the cochlear epithelium and what few ex vivo explant or in vivo studies have been conducted have often relied on the presence/absence of HCs as an indicator of regeneration. However, this metric cannot accurately identify acute HC protection from actual regeneration of new cells. Therefore, the goal of the proposed studies is to use an improved, more definitive, drug screening method to evaluate a targeted library that was generated by artificial intelligence in hopes of identifying drugs that may induce mammalian HC regeneration. Year one focused on screening compounds using a cochlear explant model that uses fate-mapping to identify regenerated HCs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2023
- Accession Number
- AD1216072
Entities
People
- Becky Rose
- Brandon C Cox
- Debbie Hamilton
- Hannah Johnson
- Jarnail Singh
- Melanie Bedolli
- Sujata Pandey
Organizations
- Southern Illinois University School of Medicine