18-month-old child regains hearing thanks to gene therapy

Today, when her mother claps her hands, a little girl, deaf from birth, turns around. It is a victory for British medicine which allows this one and a half year old child to marvel at all sounds. She is the youngest child in the world to have benefited from a revolutionary treatment. “Six months after her operation, we were told that her hearing was almost normal and that she reacted to very soft sounds”, confided his mother. When the little girl was born, the cells in her inner ear did not communicate with the hearing nerve, a genetic condition treated with gene therapy.

Results that suggest a new era

The functional gene is first integrated into an inactivated virus, then it is injected into the inner ear and the cells gradually repair themselves. “With this method, we are not integrating a large amount of gene therapy into the rest of the body and this reduces side effects”, explained Dr Richard Brown, pediatrician at Cambridge Hospital. Even the medical team did not expect such good results, which point to a new era in the treatment of genetic deafness.