In a day to day advent into various fields of medical research, experts have now come up with an interesting method to treat the hearing loss in children. This is generally referred as a new magnetic delivery method through which precisely a 50 per cent the hearing loss caused as a result of treatment by a widely used chemotherapy drug will be dealt in perfection.

This commonly used drug’s name is ‘Cisplatin’, it is in practice to treat childhood cancers but can lead to permanent or severe high-frequency hearing loss in nine out of 10 children post the treatment methodology. Though steroids can reduce cisplatin-induced hearing loss they may also reduce the effectiveness of cisplatin’s ability to kill cancer cells in another way.

The outcomes implicate that they need to be directly delivered to the cochlea to be effective and to avoid this side-effect. To sort out this issue, researchers used magnetic fields to push drug-covered iron nanoparticles into the cochlea or the inner ear and reduced hearing loss in mice treated with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin by 50 per cent.

Ralph Holme, the Director of Research at Action on Hearing Loss which actually is a UK-based charity has said, “It is great news that progress is being made towards finding new ways to protect children’s hearing following cancer treatment with cisplatin which causes the sensory hair cells in the cochlea that detect sound to die and can leave cancer survivors who have already gone through a traumatic experience depressed and isolated.”

The details of the research are published in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, is significantly more efficient than a normal intra-tympanic injection and could be used to deliver any drug to the ear and can also be used to deliver drugs into eyes or into the skin.

On the whole, the researchers anticipate that the novel approach could also be used to deliver a wide range of drug, gene and stem cell-based treatments to ultimately treat many different types of hearing loss altogether.

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