Christopher Cederroth News Today

An international team of researchers has developed a new method to deliver drugs into the inner ear. The discovery was possible by harnessing the natural flow of fluids in the brain and employing a little understood backdoor into the cochlea.

Researchers have developed a new method to deliver drugs into the inner ear.  The discovery was possible by harnessing the natural flow of fluids in the brain and employing a little understood backdoor into 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.

Investigators saw a role for the stria vascularis in hearing loss with genetic data for 147,997 hearing loss cases and 575,269 controls, coupled with follow-up functional analyses in mice.