Hearing Loss May Soon Be Reversible as Frequency Therapeutics Advances Regenerative Therapy and Files IPO

The sensory hair cells of the inner ear and the cochlea serve as sound receptors, capturing acoustic signals and transmitting them to the brain, thereby enabling hearing in humans and animals.

Unfortunately, these cells are extremely fragile, susceptible to noise-induced damage, and non-regenerative in mammals. With advancing age, the hair cells in the inner ear progressively decline—a primary cause of hearing loss in the elderly.

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), there are approximately 360 million people worldwide with moderate to severe hearing loss, and an additional 1.1 billion people are at risk of hearing loss due to recreational noise exposure.

Since the 1970s, research on auditory hair cell regeneration has been ongoing. Top medical research centers around the world publish a large number of papers on this topic each year. However, there are many bottlenecks in this technology that have not yet been overcome.

“Nothing more than a beautiful bubble,” such skepticism continues to emerge.

Yet, there are always those who refuse to believe it. Biologists have already demonstrated the hair cell regenerative capacity in birds and amphibians—In nature, this regenerative capacity exists.。

In 2015, David Lucchino, MIT’s Chris Loose, and Dr. Will Mclean co-founded Frequency Therapeutics, a cutting-edge biotechnology company dedicated to research on hair cell regeneration for hearing loss.

The company has established research collaborations with multiple medical and scientific institutions, including Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in an effort to identify a method for regenerating auditory hair cells.

Therapies for hearing loss have long been constrained by the inability to obtain sufficient quantities of mammalian cochlear hair cells. Inspired by prior research on the controlled expression of the Lgr5 protein in intestinal stem cells, researchers tracked cells with differential Lgr5 protein expression and successfully identified progenitor cells capable of differentiating into cochlear hair cells.

Based on this, researchers successfully identified an effective small molecule that enabled the culture of mouse cochlear progenitor cells into large, highly differentiated cell populations, from which cochlear hair cells were successfully derived.

Undoubtedly, this represents a significant step forward in hearing loss research.Dr. Jeff Karp of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital stated, “This holds significant implications for drug development, siRNA expression, and genetic screening.”

Not only in adult mouse cells, but researchers also studied progenitor cells in primates and humans, achieving consistent results.The team increased the differentiation efficiency from progenitor cells to hair cells by 60-fold. More importantly, the hair cells differentiated using this technique are essentially identical in characteristics to native hair cells.

On February 21, 2017, the research findings were published in the journal *Cell*. Previously, drug discovery for inner ear disorders was hindered by the inability to obtain sufficient quantities of primary cells, making it difficult to identify drug targets. The emergence of this technology has undoubtedly addressed this urgent need.

Dr. Will McLean, Co-Founder and Vice President, stated, “This technology not only applies to the field of hearing but also ushers in a new era for the entire field of progenitor cell research.”

He believes that the application of this technology is by no means limited to the regeneration of auditory hair cells; it also holds promising applications in dermatology, ophthalmology, gastrointestinal diseases, and diabetes. Progenitor cell research has consistently been a high-ground area in biotechnology, and this technology serves as a platform that brings more possibilities to progenitor cell research.

Naturally, such technology has also garnered the favor of investors.

On April 11, 2017, Frequency Therapeutics secured a $32 million Series A financing round led by CoBro Ventures. Other participants in this round included China’s Morningside Venture Capital, Emigrant Capital, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Korea’s Korean Investment Partnership, and other international investors.

The funds raised in this round will support Frequency Therapeutics’ next phase of translational research. Bob Langer, one of the principal investigators behind the technology, revealed that his research institution is collaborating with Frequency Therapeutics to translate the technology into a simple injectable therapy that delivers drugs directly to the inner ear.

It is reported that Frequency Therapeutics’ clinical trials will commence next year.