Is it finally here? Reversing sensorineural hearing loss by hearing hair cell regeneration?

Hearing Loss
#1

It sure looks like it. According to this, the company has dosed 200 people thus far with success. Their measurement for hearing improvement is improvement in speech perception.

Clearly, this tech is still several years (at least a decade?) off, but the fact that they have finally made some progress in this area is astounding.

Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

MIT spinout Frequency Therapeutics’ drug candidate stimulates the growth of hair cells in the inner ear.

Most of us know someone affected by hearing loss, but we may not fully appreciate the hardships that lack of hearing can bring. Hearing loss can lead to isolation, frustration, and a debilitating ringing in the ears known as tinnitus. It is also closely correlated with dementia.

The biotechnology company Frequency Therapeutics is seeking to reverse hearing loss — not with hearing aids or implants, but with a new kind of regenerative therapy. The company uses small molecules to program progenitor cells, a descendant of stem cells in the inner ear, to create the tiny hair cells that allow us to hear.

Hair cells die off when exposed to loud noises or drugs including certain chemotherapies and antibiotics. Frequency’s drug candidate is designed to be injected into the ear to regenerate these cells within the cochlea. In clinical trials, the company has already improved people’s hearing as measured by tests of speech perception — the ability to understand speech and recognize words.

“Speech perception is the No. 1 goal for improving hearing and the No. 1 need we hear from patients,” says Frequency co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Chris Loose PhD ’07.

In Frequency’s first clinical study, the company saw statistically significant improvements in speech perception in some participants after a single injection, with some responses lasting nearly two years.

The company has dosed more than 200 patients to date and has seen clinically meaningful improvements in speech perception in three separate clinical studies. Another study failed to show improvements in hearing compared to the placebo group, but the company attributes that result to flaws in the design of the trial.

Now Frequency is recruiting for a 124-person trial from which preliminary results should be available early next year.

#2

There have been a number of forum posts and articles on this company over the years. Enter “Frequency Therapeutics” into the search box. That will give you some of them.

The most recent post that I know of is https://forum.hearingtracker.com/t/regrowing-hairs-in-ear-canal-for-hearing-improvement/. It discusses the same article that you mention. A bit of a fluff piece in my view.

Once upon a time, I was as excited about them as you are now. Yeah, it might still come good. Here’s to positivity.

1 Like
#3

Looks like it hadn’t worked… quite disheartening.

https://frequencytx.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/frequency-therapeutics-announces-topline-results-its-phase-2b

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#4

Hoping for a breakthrough

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#5

Well I’ll believe it when I hear it, remember they can’t even find a “cure” for baldness, growing “hair” seems to be illusive, I mean elusive.

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#6

I certainly trust the folks at Harvard over other bull sh*t companies that have tried to spread such news only to disappear a month or two later, never to be heard from again until it finally comes out from the trials that their “treatment” didn’t work.

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#7

Bryan Johnson is trying to lower his biological age as well as improve his hearing.

Not sure if it’ll actually work tho.

Costing him $2 million a year to try all this.

(They mentioned about his hearing in a PodCast that I was listening to, yesterday.)

#8

Frequency Therapeutics was founded by Harvard/MIT luminaries. They promoted the hell out of it based partly on their reputations and their positions at Harvard. They made millions out of the stock float, and it tanked.

Zheng, I’d trust a bit more maybe. The lab he runs specialises in hearing, and he seems to have done more basic research before talking about commercialisation. Still, the Harvard association doesn’t imp;ress me anymore.

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#9

Frequency Therapeutics announced earlier this year that they were discontinuing all cochlea research.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/frequency-therapeutics-to-discontinue-fx-322-development-program-to-immediately-reduce

#10

A friend was a senior member of the staff at frequencytx, and he’s been let go. He’s taking a break before he finds new work, but he had interesting comments about how deceptive the human interactions with hearing tests are. People were scoring better in hearing tests because they wanted it to be true that they could hear better. But there was no statistical difference between those treated with real deal and those treated with placebos. The leader of their testing thought it was going very well for them because a significant number of people had improvements when tested. But he wasn’t aware of who was in the placebo part and who received the real treatment.

I found it interesting that when my friend put two and two together to realize I had hearing issues and was aware of their testing trials, he said he wanted me to keep him completely ignorant of if I entered the trials.

WH

#11

That’s interesting. The main thing is do not wait for some future cure to happen. Don’t wait for a new drug or a completely internal CI or something else.
Current technology is amazing already and delaying can actually reduce whatever your best benefit could be.
I’ve had to delay because of FDA and insurance but now, as of October, they are both onboard. As such, I’m finally in line to get a CI after 46yrs. My outcome will likely be much more poorer as a result but I’m not going to wait any longer.

1 Like
#12

What they said at the time was that people were deliberately underperforming on their initial tests in the 2b trial so that they could get into the trial. This was after the company had moved from audiograms to speech recognition as the primary measure. The movement in thresholds had been minimal and patchy, so speech recognition seemed like a better bet. Unfortunately word recognition is also apparently easier to fake. So, they moved the goalposts, the new site for the goalposts turned out to be a swamp, the goalposts sank and that was it. Ironically, they only had themselves to blame for people wanting to get on the trial so badly. They promoted it far and wide.