[meowface]

>The researchers found that some body tissues regenerate much better than others. They studied the lining of the small intestine, which turns over roughly every four days, because it’s designed to absorb and distribute nutrients to other parts of the body. Drs. Karp and Langer saw the molecular pathways that signal the lining’s cells to turn over quickly and form new tissues.

>Around the same time, another scientific group found very similar cells in the cochlea – but with one big difference: in the cochlea, these cells weren’t active. They saw that the cochlea’s cells didn’t regenerate and form new sensory hair cells. “So that was the formation of Frequency,” LeBel explains. “And Frequency was asking, why is that the case? Why is it that the cochlea isn’t regenerating cells and the small intestine is?”

>This led to the discovery of two small molecules that make up FX-322, which targets these cells, called progenitor cells. Essentially, this process is meant to drive hair cell regeneration: The drug targets pathways to those cochlear cells, and when activated, they divide and form a new cell of themselves, called daughter cells. “And then most importantly, they form a new sensory hair cell,” LeBel says.

That sounds incredible. If it really can reliably do what they claim with no significant negative side effects, that'd seem like one of the most "miraculous" treatments I've heard of in a while, both in terms of the technique and what it could accomplish.

[lr4444lr]

Yep. Frequency Therapeutics could make a tremendous medical breakthrough here. But some caution is warranted, even in light of their promising human trials: cochlear cell regeneration and subsequent hearing restoration is observed in reptiles and birds, so there is reason to believe that they can coax mammalian ears to do the same thing, but it may not be as generalizable a result across the human body. But damn will people start trying mightily if it succeeds in the ears. That said, even simply finding a cure for sensorineural hearing loss is nothing short of perhaps one of the top 10 medical breakthroughs in the last 50 years if you look at the cost to society and prevalence of it.

[meowface]

My baseless armchair speculative fear, with absolutely zero knowledge of this field or technology, is if some of the new hair cells could maybe somehow not fully "sync with" or complement the existing set and perhaps just make you hear "differently" but not necessarily better, and perhaps even worse in some contexts, depending on what % of your existing hair cells were healthy.

I have no clue if that has any remote basis in reality, though. And perhaps your brain would eventually learn to sort it all out, so maybe any increased sensory sensitivity would generally be a net plus either way, once enough time passes.

[fouc]

The cochlea is like a snail-shell shaped organ, lined with hairs. When the sound wave - or more specifically the vibration - reaches a bunch of hairs, they in turn fire a bunch of neurons.

The distance the sound wave travels into the organ is related to whether it is a high pitched or low pitched sound. The hairs are essentially "dumb", they only trigger the neuron firings when they detect the vibration.

So regenerating the hairs in the cochlea definitely won't change one's "natural" hearing, but for those that have had missing or damaged hairs for a long time, there'll definitely be an adjustment period where the brain has to re-learn how to interpret the new input. (About 2 weeks or so)

[meowface]

If I'm not mistaken, though, hair cells aren't really "fungible" / identical, right?

>Auditory hair cells are specialized along the length of the cochlea to respond to specific sound frequencies. ... Each of our roughly 16,000 hair cells is dedicated to a narrow frequency range. These cells are ordered along the basilar membrane according to the frequencies they detect. [1]

In that sense, they're dumb in terms of just encoding oscillation patterns, kind of like an electric guitar pickup, but even though a pickup is "dumb", you can get different results depending on the placement and type.

I'm just wondering if and how the newly generated hair cells somehow fit in where they're needed, and how general or controllable the process is.

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/hearing...

[fouc]

they should be identical/fungible, it's the location that corresponds to the sound frequency, the nerves to be triggered are in the walls of the cochlea, underneath the hairs.

[meowface]

Ah, thanks, that makes sense, and makes me a lot less worried about potential negative consequences.

[anon73044]

My fear would be that they see this product has a bigger market at targeting make hair loss than hearing loss. That said, I wouldn't hesitate to take it today if it would rid me of this wretched ringing.

[JonathonW]

Cochlear hair cells are fundamentally different types of cells than the hair follicles that produce the hair on your head; the name is more than a little misleading in this respect. Cochlear hair cells get their name from hair-like structures called stereocilia that project from the surface of the cells; they don't produce anything like the protein filaments that make up human hair.

A treatment that happened to have application to both male hair loss and hearing loss due to cochlear damage would be a really weird coincidence.

[therealx]

If that's true, you can almost guarantee a cottage industry of doctors writing off label scripts.