Israeli Discovery Could Lead To Cure For Deafness

What will those Zionists think of next?

The research, carried out over three years by world-renowned geneticist Prof. Karen Avraham of Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine and Dr. Lilach Friedman and other post-doctoral researchers in her lab, has just been released for publication in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).

About one out of every two elderly people suffers from some degree of hearing disability, while one in 1,000 infants is born deaf due to mutant genes. Healthy babies are born with 15,000 sensory hair cells in each ear that allow them to hear. These hair cells are responsible for translating sounds to electrical pulses that the brain can interpret.

When these cells die off in a process called apoptosis, it results in hearing disability, and when the hair cells are all gone, profound deafness follows. Finding the mechanism in which apoptosis occurs might make it possible to prevent it.

MicroRNAs, first described by US labs in 1993 and named in 2001, are single-stranded RNA molecules that regulate gene expression and decide whether proteins will be produced.