CystEar – Development of a scalable method to generate stem cell-derived inner ear organoids

Hearing loss is a major burden for public health, affecting more than 460 million people worldwide, 34 million of which are children. It is estimated that by 2050 over 900 million people will have disabling hearing loss.

Inner ear organoids bears great potential as a cost-effective solution to model both human hearing loss and balance dysfunction in the context of personalized medicine.

Our objective is to develop a new scalable method as a standard for inner ear organoid generation from mouse embryonic stem cells to make inner ear organoids amenable to translational research and reinforce their value as models.

One short-term perspective of our work is that inner ear organoids could be used as a tool to make mouse inner ear gene therapy amenable to humans, by screening for effective gene transfer vectors. Furthermore, we also expect our tools to be applicable to other types of organoids and therefore target a wide range of end- users in the context of regenerative medicine.