By Lauren McGrath

In October, the Scientific Director of Hearing Health Foundation (HHF)’s Hearing Restoration Project (HRP), Peter Barr-Gillespie, Ph.D., was the keynote speaker of The New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS)’s “Hearing Restoration and Hair Cell Regeneration,” a symposium to connect internationally recognized hearing loss experts from academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations. Barr-Gillespie’s hour-long presentation on the HRP—HHF’s international scientific consortium dedicated to uncovering biological cures for human hearing loss—is now available online with closed captioning.

Barr-Gillespie provides background on the genesis of the HRP—including the HHF-funded research that hearing restoration is possible in non-mammalian animals—and its guiding principles of collaboration and open science. Also discussed are noteworthy projects by HRP-funded researchers, including:

• Liz Oesterle, Ph.D., who concluded that in the inner ears of mice, differentiated supporting cells remain intact for a substantial length of time, and that targets for conversion to hair cells should include differentiated supporting cells;

• Neil Segil, Ph.D., whose work shows that the activation of supporting cells to produce proliferation or transdifferentiation will require chromatin reprogramming;

• Stefan Heller, Ph.D., whose lab found that there are distinct responses of tall and short hair cells to aminoglycoside damage, and that the proliferation of tall hair cells post-damage seems to be linked to the expression of interferon genes; and

• Seth Ament, Ph.D., whose research concludes that the comparison of multiple datasets across all threes species—chick, mouse, and zebrafish—is viable and that we are on the pathway to definition of gene regulatory networks using these bioinformatics approaches

The presentation also highlights the gEAR (gene Expression Analysis Resource) conceived by consortium member Ronna Hertzano, M.D., Ph.D. gEAR is a web-based tool that’s publicly accessible to hearing scientists that allows a user to input a gene and query all related experiments to find out where that gene is expressed.

Looking to the future, Barr-Gillespie is hopeful that the consortium will be able to develop a better understanding of how gene-regulatory networks are used to build hair cells, as well as maintain supporting cells, to enable rational regeneration strategies. The HRP’s success in regenerating hair cells in the human inner ear could restore hearing in millions of people, and the consortium is grateful to the donors who make their life-changing work possible.

For more information about the HRP, see hhf.org/hrp.

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