Have You Heard? Viral-Mediated Gene Therapy Restores Hearing

“Genetic loss of VGLUT3 in cochlear inner hair cells results in profound deafness. In this issue of Neuron, Akil et al. (2012) show that AAV-mediated introduction of wild-type VGLUT3 in the genetically deaf mouse cochlea results in significantly improved hearing.”

Profoundly cool – using a defective virus to target specific cell types, to restore something as fundamental as hearing. This could go a long way to restoring some of the potential that the gene therapy field was seen to have, before the disasters of death associated with recombinant adenovirus use, and leukaemia with recombinant retroviruses.

See on www.sciencedirect.com

This entry was posted on 7 September, 2012 at 10:00 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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