Developing a Strategy to "Reprogram" a Patient's Own Skin Cells to Generate a New Working Inner Ear: Finding a Key Gene Using a Human Tissue Sample

A successful outcome in the project outlined in this proposal will enable us to reprogram a patient’s skin cell to regenerate the inner ear. This technology will be eventually implemented in our clinical practice as a driving force to cure deafness at Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH). Since we are the first research group to be able to move this project forward, success in this project will lead to the Northwestern Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss at NMH in the near future. I strongly believe that the establishment of this initiative will provide us with another big step in furtherance of the NMH mission: “the patient comes first”.