Using stem cells to develop a cure for deafness
Deafness Research UK is funding a new research programme that will be the first to try and develop a cure for deafness using stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood or bone marrow.
[Project Grant, 2006-2009]
This three-year project is based in the Centre for Stem Cell Biology at the University of Sheffield and has been made possible by a £126,000 charitable donation from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
It is the first research to use these promising new lines of stem cells, which are less controversial than stem cells derived from human embryos, in the search for a cure for deafness.
Dr Rivolta has been studying stem cells taken from the inner ear of human foetuses, trying to understand the journey that these stem cells take to become a fully functioning, specialised cell of the inner ear.
Two of the most important types of cell in the inner ear are the 'hair cells', which detect sounds, amplify them and transform them into an electrical signal, and the 'nerve cells' which act as a link between the hair cells and the brain and carry the electrical signal that tells the brain what sounds are being heard. With age-related deafness, our hair cells gradually die off and, because they cannot be replaced, as we get older, the connection with the nerve is also lost and the nerves themselves degenerate.
Dr Rivolta's research opens up the possibility of growing both hair cells and nerves from stem cells and so far has been very promising. Dr Rivolta said: "So far, we've learnt how to extract and grow them easily, how to maintain and look after them, and how to control their environment so that they become inner ear nerve cells or hair cells," he says. "We think we've successfully created a 'recipe book' for the growing conditions necessary to get other sources of stem cells to become inner ear cells."
These cells could also be used for screening drugs to see if they can damage cells in the inner ear. In the future, this work may even lead to the development of hair cell transplantation techniques in patients with hearing loss.
