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Comment by patorjk | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, there's a lot of exciting regenerative work going on related to hearing at the moment. Sometime soon we may no longer need hearing aids. There are some neat drugs either in clinical trials or about to begin clinical trials that will re-grow hair cells and broken synapses in the cochlea (ex: FX-322, OTO-413, OTO-6XX).

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I am closely following FX-322, but mostly for tinnitus. I do have hearing loss, but it is that disrupting so far. But the tinnitus is something I could definitely live without.

Any other clinical trials that you can recommend ? Has the path from clinical trials to commercial launch shortened ?

Stefan Heller from Stanford's lab had set a goal somewhere around in 2010 to cure hearing loss by 2020 by trying to convert stem cells to hair cells. I have never heard of any breakthrough. I hope this happens in 10 more years at least.

This is similar to how Frequency's FX-322 drug works. It stimulates progenitor cells [1] within the cochlea to divide and form new hair cells. From what I've read, progenitor cells are basically one step away from a stem cell.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progenitor_cell

thanks, looks interesting. I hope these are only first steps to more interesting developments.

Are any of these supposed to work on congenital hearing loss, or only when hearing loss is caused by damage/age?

It depends on the nature of the hearing loss, for example, FX-322 and OTO-6XX appear to work by triggering regeneration of hair cells, while OTO-413 appears to work by triggering regeneration of synaptic connections (both of which are probably egregious oversimplifications because I am a security nerd, not a medical researcher :P)

In theory i believe if regeneration of cells is involved it should work with congenital but i guess there might be other complexities that might be involved (not a medical professional).

wow! ah, other than naive googling on those drug candidate identifiers, are there any sources you'd recommend to read more about this?

(I have a genetic condition that tl;dr impacts hair cell substrate material leading to hearing loss by early teens. Being able to hear natively again would be ... words fail me.)

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