Stem Cell Breakthrough

There is promising news in stem cell research for people with hearing loss.  Heller Laboratory at Stanford University is reporting that after 10 years of work in their lab, they have

“found a way to develop mouse cells that look and act just like the animal's inner-ear hair cells—the linchpin to our sense of hearing and balance—in a petri dish.”

This is a huge step towards being able to restore hearing naturally in people with damaged inner-ear cells.  As I have written about before, birds are able to regenerate their damaged inner-ear hair cells so they are never rendered permanently deaf, but mammals do not have this ability.  Researchers studying chicken cochlea realized that if they could use stem cells to regrow the hair cells in the cochlea of mammals, then they could work towards restore hearing in people with hearing loss.  Today, we’re one step closer!

This is what Brandt had been hoping for (and counting on) for many years, before we found out last year that his hearing would be gone long before stem cell therapy would be available.  Although we are excited that Cochlear Implants are a viable option to replace his hearing soon, we’re still hopeful that he can someday experience real, natural hearing through stem cell therapy.  (It would also require gene therapy—tracking down which genes are damaging his hair cells and ‘fixing’ them—but we won’t worry about that right now…)

I can’t help but wonder what the reaction will be in the Deaf community.  One of the arguments I have heard from the Deaf against Cochlear Implants is that it does not restore natural hearing, it ‘merely’ replaces hearing through digital codes that stimulate the auditory nerve.  The CI user, so the argument goes, is still deaf—once the CI processor is removed, they still can’t hear anything (the surgery wipes out all residual hearing).  And since the processor provides a computer’s digital rendering of sound, it is not the same as ‘real’ hearing.  It often takes many, many months for the CI user to learn how to hear with the implant.  There are also risks with the CI implantation surgery itself to consider. 

Stem cell therapy, however, would actually provide real hearing—and undoubtedly without near as much risk.  So while this is wonderfully promising news for the millions of people with hearing loss who want their natural hearing back, it may well push Deaf culture closer to the brink of extinction.  It’s a dilemma I’ll leave to explore another day; and we’re still several decades (at least) before stem cell therapy would be available for the general public.  But it is an issue that will become a reality soon enough, and something that will affect our children and grandchildren if it does not fully affect us.