Human Embryonic Stem Cell Colony

Hearing loss will be a rising medical concern as “baby boomers” move into retirement.  Loud music over the years and an increasingly noisy environment are causative factors, but the physiology comes from losing many of the 30,000 cochlear and vestibular hair cells in each ear.  Before regenerative medicine can contemplate a stem cell transplant strategy, it has to figure out how to grow those cells in the lab-and that is what Stanford scientists have recently accomplished with mice.  Not only did they grow these cells in vitro, they demonstrated that they responded to mechanical stimulation just like the stereocilia of the ear.     MORE

Image Credit:  Wikipedia