It's somewhat of a given that over the course of your life, you'll lose your hearing to some degree. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Your intestine can recreate itself every five days or so, and there's a science there that can be (hopefully) be applied to other parts of the body. Chris is amongst a group of fellows and researchers who are looking at regenerative tissue and making it a reality not just for your hearing but perhaps for other parts of the body as well. Who knows... we could be in for a regenerative future. And perhaps one where we can live to be well over 100 and still look like we're 22. Cue the Adele song "When We Were Young" and look into this fascinating science; the applications described here are endless and incredible. Chris is here to promote The Hertz Foundation.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/chris-loose-humans-have-regenerative-abilities-scientists-just-need-to-turn-them-on
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Transcript: Hearing loss is a growing problem with increased prevalence, and the reason for this is because evolutionarily humans are not designed to withstand the assaults of modern society.
Interestingly if you look at places like Easter Island, people maintain normal hearing into old age, but it’s just by living the modern society where we have subways and cars and cities and iPods that we are overburdening our hearing and causing a great deal of hearing loss.
The origin of hearing loss is often the loss of what are called sensory hair cells in the cochlea. And these hair cells move in response to sound and create a signal that gets sent to your brain, and that’s really the origin of hearing.
Now what happens with hearing loss is those delicate hair cells start to die off over time due to external insults from loud noise or certain types of drugs. When that happens they are not naturally regenerated in mammals.
Interestingly, many species like birds and reptiles, if you knock out their hair cells and wait a period of time—a month—their hair cells come back naturally, and they can start hearing again.
So this process is hardwired into nature but mammals just haven’t found a way to turn on the system.
With many technologies designed to address hearing loss, they really just treat symptoms rather than the root cause of the disease, which is the loss of the hair cell.
And the way to think about this is like if you have a TV screen and you start losing the pixels on the TV screen; essentially what these aid devices do is they make the screen brighter, but they don’t fundamentally replace all the pixels that are lost.
So it does help to pick up some degree of signal, but it doesn’t in any way replace that native function of hearing, which is really our goal of re-growing hair cells and putting those pixels back in place and giving you that natural hearing.
At Frequency we’re focused on an entirely new mode of medicine and the objective of this is to make your body’s natural stem or progenitor cells regenerate damaged tissue in place.
And this could really transform medicine across a whole variety of diseases and organs. And where we’ve learned this from is actually looking at the portions of the human body that are very regenerative.
For instance, if you look at the human intestine, it re-creates itself every five days entirely. And that will actually last until you’re well over 100 years old, so your body knows how to re-create certain tissues.
Our objective is to identify what are the local signals that cells get from their niche environment that tells them to start to regrow and start to repair tissue, so we can start turning on the dormant progenitor and stem cells that exist throughout the body.
In order to make good medicines out of that, we focus on applications where those cells can be activated very selectively and very locally for a short period of time. That gives you tremendous benefits in terms of the safety and controllability of reactivating these systems.
And our first application is to do this in hearing loss, where we found that there are dormant progenitors that exist within the cochlea that in some species have the capacity to regenerate, but in mammals are locked in an off position and we are simply finding small molecule drugs, traditional drugs that can go in, turn on those progenitors and re-create hair cells, in this case in the cochlea, to restore the hearing function.
