Hearing Research

The Northwest Lions Foundation for Sight & Hearing has committed $250,000 over a five-year period to fund important hearing research by internationally renowned neuroscientist Dr. Ed Rubel and his team of researchers.

Dr. Edwin Rubel
Lions Hearing Research
Laboratory

Dr. Rubel’s team is involved in a project that holds the potential for reversing or ameliorating as much as 70 percent of the hearing loss that exists in the world today. By studying and reconstructing how the tiny hair cells in a bird’s inner ear regrow themselves after being damaged, the team believes it can create a biological triggering mechanism to induce their human counterparts to replicate the feat. In normal hearing, it is the movement of these hairs within the inner ear that triggers electrical impulses that take the auditory signal to the brain. When the hair cells in the inner ear die as a result of exposure to loud noises or chemicals, humans lose the ability to hear certain sounds. As they continue to make small breakthroughs at the cellular level, Dr. Rubel’s team has now experienced some success at hair cell regeneration.

“We support this research because we saw an opportunity to tackle the problem of hearing loss on a universal scale,” says Dr. Minifie, Immediate Past Chairman of the Northwest Lions Foundation for Sight & Hearing. “The potential impact of being able to reverse hearing loss for millions of people is definitely worth the investment.”