Fishy Cure for Hearing Loss: Medicine's Next Big Thing?

Reported March 2010

NEW YORK (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Thirty million people in the U.S. suffer significant hearing problems. Another 2 million are profoundly deaf. Now, scientists are working with a tiny tropical zebrafish to find some unusual answers that could help people hear again.

Seventy-four-year-old pharmacist Gerald Zive, R.Ph., C.F., runs a busy pharmacy in the Bronx.

"I would say I am about 40 percent deaf," Zive told Ivanhoe.

Zive was an artillery officer in the military and has suffered progressive hearing loss ever since. He wears the latest hearing aids, but there are drawbacks.

"I have trouble hearing people around a dinner table or restaurant," Zive explained.

Neuroscientist James Hudspeth, M.D., Ph.D., runs a busy laboratory at Rockefeller University. What he does here could impact Zive.

"In this room, we have some 750 fish tanks containing 10,000 zebrafish," Hudspeth said.

The tiny zebrafish inside Hudspeth's lab could unlock the answer to restoring Zive's hearing loss.

"When I tap on the tank, you'll see that they jump," Dr. Hudspeth demonstrated. "Some of them though, don't and we can then know that these fish are deaf and study the genetic changes."

Dr. Hudspeth and his team study these zebrafish because they can regrow their own hair cells, while humans can't.

"In more than 90 percent of human deafness, what's missing are hair cells, the sensory receptors of the internal ear," Dr. Hudspeth said. "What we want to do and what we hope to do is to replace those cells. Now the zebrafish can tell us how those cells might be replaced. We hope to learn what genes are involved, and then to learn how to switch those same genes in our own ear, and by that means to restore hearing."

They'll do this by learning what genes are turned on in the zebrafish and turn the same genes on in humans.

"So our hope is that we can actually end deafness," Dr. Hudspeth said.

That's something Zive has been waiting to hear

""I would definitely consider it a breakthrough of hearing today," Zive said. "I'd personally be very excited about it to have my full hearing back."

The zebrafish team is also working with skin stem cells to convert them into hearing stem cells.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

A. James Hudspeth, MD, PhD
Neuroscientist
Address
Rockefeller University & Howard Hughes Medical Institute
hudspaj@rockefeller.edu

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