Early steps of hair cell regeneration

More than 30 years ago, researchers discovered that birds naturally regenerate auditory hair cells. These findings inspired a continuing quest to find biological cures for hearing loss. Now, with the advent of single-cell biology and bioinformatics, we have the best tools ever to get to the core of the mechanism that activates somatic stem cells in the bird’s inner ear to engage in proliferative hair cell regeneration. Years ago, our lab started a large-scale project to characterize the genes that become activated just before avian inner ear stem cells start dividing. Now, Nesrine and Mitsuo and the past members of our “team chicken” have made a breakthrough discovery of a novel signaling pathway that turned out to be essential for avian hair cell regeneration. Their work was just published in the reputable journal Developmental Cell and has already been featured in various blogs - Congratulations, Nesrine and Mitsuo, and all others involved, and thank you, Heller lab, for the continued quest to figure out how we ultimately can find ways to translate our findings towards novel treatments.

Here are links to the paper and reports by the Stem Cell Institute and the Hearing Health Foundation.