Scientists can now create new hearing cells to overcome deafness caused by age

By Joe Morgan via SWNS

Scientists can now create new hearing cells that can overcome deafness caused by age.

Considered a "major hurdle" to reverse hearing loss, the gene discovery allows the production of inner or outer ear hair cells.

Hearing loss due to aging, noise and certain cancer therapy drugs and antibiotics has before been irreversible because these cells can die.

But scientists have discovered a single master gene that can change ear cells into either outer or inner sensory hair ones.

One in six of the UK adult population is affected by hearing loss, with eight million of these being aged 60 and over.

About 900,000 people are severely or profoundly deaf.

Currently, scientists can produce an artificial hair cell, but it does not differentiate into an inner or outer cell, which provides different essential functions to produce hearing.

The discovery is a major step toward developing these specific cells.

The death of outer hair cells made by the cochlea is most often the cause of deafness and hearing loss.

The cells develop in the embryo and do not reproduce.

The outer hair cells expand and contract in response to the pressure of sound waves and amplify sound for the inner hair cells. The inner cells transmit those vibrations to the neurons to create the sounds we hear.

Finding the master gene switch TBX2, the gene can be triggered to create an inner or outer cell.

Professor Jaime Garcia-Anoveros, of Northwestern University , said: "Our finding gives us the first clear cell switch to make one type versus the other.

“It will provide a previously unavailable tool to make an inner or outer hair cell. We have overcome a major hurdle.”

Describing the coordinated movement of the inner and outer cells, Dr. Garcia-Anoveros said: “It’s like a ballet.

“The outers crouch and jump and lift the inners further into the ear.

“The ear is a beautiful organ. There is no other organ in a mammal where the cells are so precisely positioned with micrometric precision. Otherwise, hearing doesn’t occur.

“We can now figure out how to make specifically inner or outer hair cells and identify why the latter are more prone to dying and cause deafness."

The study was published in the journal Nature.