Stem Cell Therapy for the Inner Ear

When inner ear stem cell therapy becomes a reality.

Editorial The clinical treatment of hearing loss is at once sophisticated and crude. Surgeons can use microsurgical techniques and lasers to manipulate ossicular prostheses fractions of a millimeter with often astounding improvement in hearing, for example, in the case of stapes fixation due to otosclerosis. For profound sensorineural impairment, the cochlea may be surgically implanted with an ...

Stem Cell Replacement Therapy for the Mammalian Inner Ear: A Systematic Literature Review

Inner ear cell therapy targeting hereditary deafness by activation of stem cell homing factors

Congenital deafness affects about 1 in 1000 children and more than half of them have a genetic background such as Connexin26 (CX26) gene mutation. Inner ear cell therapy for sensorineural hearing loss has been expected to be an effective therapy for hereditary deafness. Previously, we developed a novel strategy for inner ear cell therapy using bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells as a supplement ...

Investigating a Cell Replacement Therapy in the Inner Ear

The mammalian auditory system is sensitive to genetic disorders, aging and injuries caused by overstimulation, ototoxic drugs and viral infections. Since the sensory epithelium (the organ of Corti) and the spiral ganglion neurons (SGNs) in adult mammalian do not regenerate spontaneously when they are damaged, a cell substitution strategy was proposed to compensate the function of the degenerate...

Cell- and gene-therapy approaches to inner ear repair.

Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder in humans. It is primarily due to the degeneration of highly specialised mechanosensory cells in the cochlea, the so-called hair cells. Hearing problems can also be caused or further aggravated by the death of auditory sensory neurons that convey the information from the hair cells to the brain stem. Despite the discovery of stem/pr...