Each year, the ANR launches a call for proposals called AAPG, which allows researchers of various scientific fields to obtain co-financing on a large scale of research themes.
This year, 4 projects led by researchers from the Hearing Institute obtained financing. Here is a resume of their projects.
Hypersonic project: probing affective and neurophysiological hyper-excitability to sound in temporal lobe epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder affecting millions of people throughout the world and requires innovative therapeutical and diagnostical approaches to improve the treatments and lives of patients.
Hypersonic, led by Luc Arnal (The Hearing Institute), Benjamin Morillon (AMU) and Fabrice Bartolomei (APHM), explore the potential of sound stimulus to track and regulate the emotional and cerebral answers in patients suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy.
How? By a non-invasive approach based on auditive stimulation, combining affective neurosciences, musicology and neurotechnology. New sound interventions are both compatible and complementary to diagnostic tools and conventional treatments of epilepsy.
HearAgain project: peripheral gene therapy to restore hearing and central auditory processing in two mouse models of progressive and profound deafness.
Deafness is a major public health concern, with a prevalence of congenital deafness of around 1 in 700 newborns and around 80% of these cases attributable to genetic causes. No curative treatments are available, but gene therapy has recently been considered as a promising treatment option. However, the current tests on mouse models of human deafness only evaluate the functioning of the peripheral auditory system. It is therefore crucial to demonstrate, prior to human application, that gene therapy can also fully restore central auditory processing to normal sound perception.
HearAgain, led by two teams at the Hearing Institute (Brice Bathellier and Saaid Safieddine), is a project aiming to assess the central and perceptual effects of gene therapy in mice. State-of-the-art tools will be used for the first time: biphotonic imaging, neuronal population analysis, perceptual measurements.
The objective is to establish, in a convincing way, that peripheral gene therapy can restore the normal sound perception, reinforcing the basis of a clinical application.
Speak Out project: a cortico-computer interface to restore speech communication.
Language and being able to communicate is an integral part of being human. The importance of communication is perhaps most evident when it is hampered or lost, as in patients suffering from neurological or motor conditions such as locked-in syndrome (LIS), dysarthria, anarthria, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and aphasia.
SpeakOut is a project led by a consortium including the Hearing Institute, the Lariboisière Hospital, the ICM, the INRIA Saclay, and the University of Geneva. It has the objective to restore the capacity of speaking to patients suffering from locked-in syndrome, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and/or cerebral palsy by the creation of a brain-computer interface.
To learn more about this project, click here.
NeuropatHEAR project: deciphering the pathophysiological mechanisms of genetic forms of auditory neuropathy.
Although most of the hearing disorders are linked to a dysfunction of sensory cells and can translate into an abnormal hearing threshold, auditory neuropathies, which touch the auditory nerve with/without a loss of sensory cells, represent at least 10% of the cases of hearing loss (600 000 patients in France). They are difficult to detect because the patient has a normal hearing threshold.
With the development of a genetic neuropathy model and new audiology methods, the NeuropatHEAR project, led by Nicolas Michalski, Jérémie Barral and Paul Avan, aims at having a better understanding of the auditory nerve, characterizing the origin of the neuropathy in genetic models and validating a new audiological diagnosis test.
NeuropatHEAR will allow a faster diagnostic in patients suffering from auditory neuropathies, by simplifying the patient care process, a first necessary step to, afterward, develop therapeutical strategies.