How to Regenerate the Human Body: Hearing Loss, Baldness, Burn Wounds
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It's somewhat of a given that over the course of your life, you'll lose your hearing to some degree. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Your intestine can re-create itself every five days or so, and there's a science there that can (hopefully) be applied to other parts of the body. Chris Loose is a Hertz Foundation Fellow, working amongst a group of fellows and researchers who are looking at regenerative tissue and making it a reality not just for your hearing but perhaps for other parts of the body as well. We could be in for a regenerative future—and perhaps one where we can live to be well over 100 and still look like we're 22. The Hertz Foundation mission is to provide unique financial and fellowship support to the nation's most remarkable PhD students in the hard sciences. Hertz Fellowships are among the most prestigious in the world, and the foundation has invested over $200 million in Hertz Fellows since 1963 (present value) and supported over 1,100 brilliant and creative young scientists, who have gone on to become Nobel laureates, high-ranking military personnel, astronauts, inventors, Silicon Valley leaders, and tenured university professors. For more information, visit hertzfoundation.org.
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CHRISTOPHER LOOSE:
Christopher Loose, PhD, serves as executive director of Yale University’s Center for Biomedical and Interventional Technology (CBIT). He holds an appointment as assistant professor adjunct of urology in the Yale School of Medicine. He is also a lecturer in entrepreneurship in the School of Management and lecturer in Biomedical Engineering. Additionally, Dr. Loose is an accelerator executive at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT).
Previously, Dr. Loose co-founded Semprus BioSciences with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professors Robert Langer and David Lucchino, and served as chief technology officer until the company was acquired by Teleflex Incorporated in 2012 (TFX: $80M). Semprus Technology was published in Science Translational Medicine and received a Frost and Sullivan Breakthrough Technology Award in 2010. Semprus’s first product, a vascular catheter with a surface modification designed to have reduced thrombus (clot) formation, was FDA-cleared in 2012.
Dr. Loose received the prestigious Hertz Foundation Fellowship and was selected by MIT’s Technology Review as a member of the “TR35,” naming the world’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35. He was awarded the inaugural Peter Strauss Entrepreneurial Award from the Hertz Foundation in 2011 and was also named to Boston Business Journal’s 40 emerging business leaders under 40.
While earning his PhD in chemical engineering at MIT, with his Hertz Fellowship, Dr. Loose co-authored the Semprus Biosciences business plan, which won entrepreneurial competitions at MIT, Harvard University and Oxford University. Prior to his graduate work, Dr. Loose was a chemical engineer at Merck Research Labs after graduating, summa cum laude, with a BSE in chemical engineering from Princeton University.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Chris Loose: Hearing loss is a growing problem with increased prevalence, and the reason for this is because evolutionarily humans are not designed to withstand the assaults of modern society.
Interestingly if you look at places like Easter Island, people maintain normal hearing into old age, but it’s just by living the modern society where we have subways and cars and cities and iPods that we are overburdening our hearing and causing a great deal of hearing loss.
The origin of hearing loss is often the loss of what are called sensory hair cells in the cochlea. And these hair cells move in response to sound and create a signal that gets sent to your brain, and that’s really the origin of hearing.
Now what happens with hearing loss is those delicate hair cells start to die off over time due to external insults from loud noise or certain types of drugs. When that happens they are not naturally regenerated in mammals.
Interestingly, many species like birds and reptiles, if you knock out their hair cells and wait a period of time—a month—their hair cells come back naturally, and they can start hearing again.
So this process is hardwired into nature but mammals just haven’t found a way to turn on the system.
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