Impact 2021

Hearing Health Foundation’s mission to fund hearing and balance research is only possible because of supporters like you.

The Hearing Restoration Project (HRP) is an international, collaborative research consortium focused on investigating inner ear hair cell regeneration using animal models to accelerate the timeline to a cure for hearing loss and tinnitus.

The Emerging Research Grants (ERG) program provides seed money to scientists researching underfunded areas of hearing and balance science, and for every dollar HHF invests, grantees receive on average $47 in major federal funding (2002–present).

Your support produced the following significant achievements this past year:

The HRP, the most prominent research consortium investigating inner ear hair cell regeneration, acquired a new scientific director in January 2021, Lisa Goodrich, Ph.D., a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.

To continue to build on the group’s strengths, the HRP reorganized its projects into three working groups that align with the consortium’s main goals: Cross-Species Epigenetics; Integrative Analysis; and Reprogramming and Gene Delivery.

Ronna Hertzano, M.D., Ph.D., and team earned a prestigious R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health for the gEAR (gene Expression Analysis Resource).

The data sharing and data visualization tool helped her team identify a handful of existing FDA-approved drugs that may protect against noise-induced hearing loss.

Scientists from the labs of Neil Segil, Ph.D., and Andrew Groves, Ph.D., have identified a natural barrier to the regeneration of the inner ear’s sensory cells, the loss with age of an important activating molecule present in newborn mice. 

Stefan Heller, Ph.D., and team found that a specific group of mouse cochlear cells could grow into organoids, suggesting a regenerative potential because these cells can multiply and generate new sensory hair cells. 

Tatijana Piotrowski, Ph.D., and team discovered an elusive cell type in fish sensory cells whose adaptive behavior indicates the varied ways hair cells regenerate.

Neil Segil, Ph.D.’s lab discovered that sensory cells in the inner ear and touch receptors in the skin share an evolutionary origin, which provides insight into how genes are regulated and how stem cells and progenitor cells differentiate into more specialized cells, including inner ear hair cells.

Members of Stefan Heller’s lab recently developed technology called single-cell RNA-sequencing to provide insight into changes in the activity of all genes as cochlear cells respond to hair cell damage and death. The comprehensive inventory of important data they created will become the basis for future work on finding relevant genes that initiate and control hair cell regeneration in birds. 

Jennifer Resnik, Ph.D., found that having problems hearing in noise, or a symptom of hidden hearing loss, can be traced to altered brain dynamics from cochlear neuropathy resulting from lesions that create a source of internal cortical noise.

Research by Angela Yarnell Bonino, Ph.D., CCC-A, helped fill a gap in the study of auditory development during children’s toddler and preschool years by confirming the reliability of a new method to measure hearing in children ages 2–4. Bonino also shows the importance of auditory development to hear in noise prior to age 2 1/2. 

Xiying Guan, Ph.D., provided a new understanding of bone conduction sound transmission and the mechanism underlying bone conduction hyperacusis (hypersensitive bone conduction hearing) in patients with superior canal dehiscence, an abnormality in the inner ear’s bony canals.

Tenzin Ngodup, Ph.D., discovered a novel class of auditory neurons in the ventral cochlear nucleus, one of the first areas of the brain that receives auditory information, that holds clues about tinnitus and auditory processing.

Using a mouse model, Khaleel Razak, Ph.D., developed novel markers of age-related auditory processing deficits that may lead to future treatments to delay or reverse hearing difficulties in older age.

Hari Bharadwaj, Ph.D., and team found that autism-related language difficulties may be tied to a receptive speech processing dysfunction where unattended meaningless speech that is filtered out in typical individuals engages the language system through involuntary attention capture. 

Dunia Abdul-Aziz, M.D., demonstrated a key protein's role in hair cell differentiation as well as the power of combining the organoid model with the genetic toolkit

David Martinelli, Ph.D., and team found that a certain protein may contribute to the maintenance of the outer hair cell synapses, which was contrary to their expectations that it is involved in the development of the auditory system.

David Jung, M.D., Ph.D., showed that a novel small molecule promotes synaptic regeneration in vitro, and furthered the development of an effective drug delivery platform for the inner ear.

Using diffusion tensor imaging and 3D printing, Elliot Kozin, M.D., and team generated 3D-printed patient-specific tumor models to assess the accuracy of brain surgery in vestibular schwannoma patients. 

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