Ian Swinburne, Ph.D.
Meet the Researcher
Ian Swinburne, Ph.D. received a B.S. in Cell and Molecular Biology from Cornell University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Cell Biology from Harvard Medical School with Pamela Silver. Swinburne conducted Post- Doctoral research at New York University in Developmental Genetics with Debbie Yelon and currently conducts research at Harvard Medical School on Systems Biology of the inner ear with Sean Megason.
The tissue of the inner ear is not just a static barrier. It contains the endolymphatic sac, which acts like a relief valve to control inner ear pressure and fluid. My goal for this project is to understand the working origins of the valve’s structure and activity.
My discovery of the relief valve activity came about through the convergence of three events: a chance recommendation from a British professor to look for the endolymphatic sac; my recovery and study of a previously isolated mutant gene that causes the valve to malfunction, taken from sperm stored in a freezer in Oregon for a decade; and my adaptation of a poison from an Asian snake for imaging the zebrafish, which allows healthy ear physiology to persist while immobilized under a microscope. It was the use of snake poison that led to my first observation of the valve activity.
Puzzles and mysteries have always interested me. In grade school through college, I liked math, chemistry, and physics, probably because their solutions are more forthcoming when compared with biology. But my interest in biology took off as an undergrad, when I worked with my dad’s colleagues in a hospital in Rochester, New York, for two summers. In the infectious diseases lab I became excited about experiments: designing, performing, and troubleshooting them. I realized there was a lot of room for creative solutions in biological research.
After graduate school, I took an embryology course in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, observing and experimenting with a wide variety of organisms: sea urchins, squids, frogs, worms, chickens, flies, and zebrafish. I became interested in how the shapes of organs arise during development and how these structures work for healthy physiology. This eventually led to exploring the relationship between structure and function in the ear.
A curiosity about nature came from playing outdoors and hiking with my family as a child. One activity I loved was waterworks: building canals and aqueducts out of sand or dirt and then pouring water through them just to watch it flow. Now I recognize an echo of that play in my study of water pressure and flow within the ear.
Ian Swinburne, Ph.D., is funded through Ménière’s Disease Grants (MDG). Launched in 2017, Hearing Health Foundation’s MDG program supports research focused on advancing our understanding of the inner ear and balance disorder.
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The Research
Harvard Medical School
Development and Physiology of the Endolymphatic Duct and Sac in Zebrafish
Abnormalities in our sense of hearing and balance are incapacitating in the extreme, and, when subtle, cause psychological distress. Meniere’s disease is an inner ear disease with unclear causes that is inferred from episodes of vertigo, hearing loss, tinnitus, and the sensation of fullness in the ear that can last two to four hours. An unstable inner ear environment is believed to underlie Meniere’s disease. Recently, Swinburne has developed methods to image the live development and physiology of the portion of the Zebrafish ear conserved in humans and believed to be dysfunctional in Meniere’s disease: the endolymphatic duct and sac. With these methods, Ian hopes to gain basic understanding of how the inner ear’s environment is normally maintained and how a defect can lead to a disease.
Classifying the endolymphatic duct and sac cell types and their gene sets using high-throughput single-cell transcriptomics
To understand how the inner ear endolymphatic duct and sac stabilize the inner ear’s environment and to identify ways to restore or elevate this function to mitigate or cure Ménière's disease. The endolymphatic duct and sac play important roles in stabilizing a fluid composition necessary for sensing sound and balance. The recurrent vertigo in Ménière's is likely caused by a malfunction of the endolymphatic sac, causing volume or pressure changes in the inner ear.
Swinburne recently found that the typical-functioning endolymphatic sac periodically inflates and deflates like a balloon, and that specialized cell structures in the sac appear to transiently open, causing the deflation of the endolymphatic sac. The sac, then, appears to act as a relief valve to maintain a consistent volume and pressure within the inner ear. This project will generate a list of endolymphatic sac cell types and the genes governing their function, which will aid in Ménière's diagnosis (which can be delayed due to the range of fluctuating symptoms) and the development of a targeted drug or gene therapy.
Long-term goal of research: To understand how the endolymphatic duct and sac stabilize the inner ear’s environment and to identify ways to restore or elevate this function to mitigate or cure Meniere’s disease.