Advancing Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Sensorineural Hearing Loss Through Optical Imaging and Stem Cell Engineering

Disabling hearing loss currently affects nearly half a billion people worldwide. This number is expected to increase to 2.5 billion people by 2050, with the associated economic cost estimated at approximately $trillion. Despite these staggering statistics, the cellular basis of the most common type of hearing loss, called sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), is unclear in living people. Consequently, available therapies are severely limited and there are no pharmacological or biological therapies approved for the treatment of SNHL. Our research addresses these unmet medical needs through domain-specific customization and fusion of tools from molecular biology, systems neuroscience, biotechnology, and otologic surgery. This talk will describe three complementary efforts: 1) the development of optical tools for high-resolution imaging of inner ear cells to enable precise diagnosis and guide therapy, 2) enhancements in genetic diagnosis and discovery enabled by large language models, and 3) the creation of human cellular models of SNHL for mechanistic studies, high throughout drug screening, and therapy development.