<
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/27/1082551/gene-treatment-deaf-children-hearing-china/>
"Here’s the easy game Li Xincheng has been playing at home. Her mother says a
few words. Then the six-year-old, nicknamed Yiyi, repeats what she heard.
“Clouds, one by one, blossomed in the mountains,” says her mother, Qin Lixue,
while covering her mouth so Yiyi can’t read her lips.
“Clouds, one, one, blossomed in big mountains” Yiyi replies.
It’s hard to believe that Yiyi was born entirely deaf.
But this year her family, who live in a high-rise block in the city of
Dongguan, enrolled her in a study of a new type of gene therapy. During the
procedure, doctors used a virus to add replacement DNA to the cells in Yiyi’s
inner ear that pick up vibrations, allowing them to transmit sound to her
brain.
In less than a month, her mother says, she was hearing with the treated ear for
the first time. Yiyi can’t explain exactly what it’s like in words, but now, at
school, she can hear the chime that ends naptime. She used to have to wait for
the other kids to tell her.
Yiyi is one of several deaf children who scientists in China say are the first
people ever to have their natural hearing pathway restored in a dramatic new
demonstration of the possibilities of gene therapy. The feat is even more
remarkable because until now, no drug of any kind has ever been able to improve
hearing.
“We were careful, and a little bit nervous, because it was the first in the
world,” says Yilai Shu, a surgeon and scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai
who is leading the experiment. His team began the treatments last December, and
before that he spent years developing the techniques involved, testing gene
injections in countless mice and guinea pigs. “That was my project: How do we
deliver this to the inner ear?” Shu says.
In the US and Europe, gene therapy has been notching successes, including
restoring limited vision to people with genetic causes of blindness. Now Shu’s
study, in which as many as 10 kids have been enrolled, may be remembered as
China’s first domestic gene-therapy breakthrough, as well the most dramatic
restoration of a lost sense yet achieved.
“Before the treatment, if you put them in a movie theater with the loudest
sound, they wouldn’t hear it,” says Zheng-Yi Chen, an associate professor at
Mass Eye and Ear, a Harvard-affiliated hospital in Boston, who helped design
and plan the study. “Now they can hear close to normal speech, and one can hear
a whisper.”"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-women-rights-france-ntds-africa-bears-europe/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
