New Engineered Systems to Prevent Hearing Loss in Sailors and Marines
Abstract
There is a growing prevalence of hearing loss across the globe, with over 360 million patients worldwide suffering from this condition. Causative factors of this dysfunction are natural aging, infections, toxic effects of drug treatments or noise over-exposure.For military personnel, hearing and understanding of verbal commands are absolutely critical for safety, survival and performance. The challenge for those who serve on Navy vessels or in shipyards is constant noise exposure, with no real quiet time. This extended exposure to high-level noise can irreversibly damage sensory hair cells found in the inner ears cochlea, damage essential auditory nerves, and alter brain circuits necessary for hearing and speech understanding all of which can cause permanent hearing loss. Consequently, nearly 500,000 U.S. veterans are currently receiving over $1 billion annually in VA disability-related compensation for hearing loss. The direct medical costs associated with hearing loss in the United States are estimated between $3.3 to $12.8 billion annually and also include the general U.S. population. According to the National Institutes of Healths National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, approximately 3.8 million adults age 20-69 who report five or more years of exposure to very loud noise have speech-frequency hearing loss in both ears.The U.S. Navys Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) program has sought to mitigate the incidence of cochlear hair cell and nerve cell damage/death in warfighters through various over-the-ear and in-the-ear noise reduction devices; however, these approaches come with a side effect of a loss in situational awareness. While advances are being made in developing therapeutics and delivering them to the inner ear to restore hearing, drug placement remains a major challenge to realizing optimal and consistent outcomes.In collaboration with a strategic commercial partner, the overarching objective of this proposal is to enable the development of a noise-level triggered drug dosing and delivery system to prevent cochlear damage. This system is intended to respond in real-time to harmful sound levels, non-invasively deploy oto-therapeutics and protect the warfighter from subsequent ear trauma. To our knowledge, this would be the first of its kind system and it has the potential to revolutionize the noise induced hearing loss protection field. Our group will focus on developing some of the key components that will facilitate the prototyping of this innovative drug delivery system through the following objectives: Development of physiologically representative tympanic and round window membrane tissue models for ear-on-a-chip devices to enable rapid screening of therapeutics Development and identification of novel hearing loss protective therapeutic agents Validation of therapeutics in ear-on-a-chip devices and development of non-invasive drug delivery systems
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Oct 19, 2020
- Source ID
- N000142012874
Entities
People
- Monica Serban
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Montana