3 game-changing hearing innovations on the horizon

3. DRUG THERAPY THAT REGROWS CELLS THAT HELP YOUR HEARING THE BIG IDEA: Your body will repair damage to your inner ear — in much the same way that salamanders regrow a tail. HOW IT MIGHT

WORK: A drug delivered into your inner ear would turn on chemical switches to regrow the cells responsible for hearing — and most hearing loss. People born with hearing loss or those who

lose hearing later in life would get a few injections to restore some or all of their hearing. WHY IT'S EXCITING: In normal inner ears, these crucial hair cells — which are long and

flexible and look like tiny fields of grass — react dynamically when sound vibrations arrive from the outer ear: they start to “dance.” The dancing movement of the hair cells is what lets

sound travel up the auditory nerve to the brain. We're born with about 15,000 of these delicate cells in each ear, and once damaged, they are gone for good — in humans, at least. In the

1980s, researchers made an interesting discovery, says Lawrence Lustig, M.D., an otolaryngologist (that is, ENT doctor) at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. They found

that birds can regrow their damaged hair cells after trauma; fish, reptiles and amphibians can repair their hair cells, too. Because of this ability, these animals never permanently become

deaf. Hearing researchers are trying to replicate this process in humans. WHO MIGHT BENEFIT: Hair cell regeneration would be a game-changer for anyone who has lost hearing as a result of

missing or damaged hair cells. Babies born deaf from specific genetic conditions would likely be an early group to receive this therapy. People who have begun to lose their hearing later in

life — soldiers and workers who have worked in extreme noise, for example, or simply those whose inner ear has suffered from the wear and tear of aging — could also be good candidates. WHEN

WE MIGHT SEE IT: Not real soon. A few hair cell regrowth therapies using different methods are currently in human clinical trials, including ones from Novartis, Eli Lilly, Frequency

Therapeutics and Pipeline Therapeutics, but most are still being tested in the lab. Lustig is confident that researchers will find ways to treat hearing loss with medicine. _Editor’s Note:

This story was corrected on Aug. 5 to say that drug therapy regrows cells that help hearing._ _Regina Nuzzo writes about science, health and medicine. Her work has appeared in _Reader’s

Digest, Prevention, Scientific American, _the_ Los Angeles Times, _and_ The New York Times, _among others. She is a professor of mathematics at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C._