Latest News

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The Mass Eye and Ear Eaton-Peabody Laboratory Associate Professor Zheng-Yi Chen speaks about his efforts to develop gene therapies for hearing loss and his recent success in rescuing hearing loss in aging mice

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Glaucoma is a disease that damages the optic nerve, the cable that connects the eye to the brain. This can lead to blindness. There are currently no symptoms for early glaucoma, but later on patients may experience difficulty seeing in the dark or difficulty reading

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Cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cells (CALEC) transplant, in which stem cells from the healthy eye and transplanted into the injured eye, for significant cornea injuries was found safe and led to gains in preliminary phase I clinical trial.

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In research published last month in The Laryngoscope, Dr. Matthew Naunheim and the team at Mass Eye and Ear surveyed 1,522 people to explore three unanswered questions in laryngology.

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Benjamin K. Mizell, MD, an anesthesiologist with a proven track record of leading major Mass Eye and Ear initiatives including its electronic medical record integration, has been named chief of Anesthesia at Mass Eye and Ear.

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An international team of researchers led by Mass Eye and Ear discovered a new genetic mutation that leads to childhood glaucoma, and in the process uncovered a new mechanism for causing the disease.

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Claes H. Dohlman, MD, Phd, considered a founder of modern cornea science, was awarded the 2022 António Champalimaud Vision Award for his vast contributions to vision research. The award comes with a €1,000,000 prize, one of the largest in scientific research.

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An artificial-intelligence (AI) model built at Mass Eye and Ear was shown to be significantly more accurate than doctors at diagnosing pediatric ear infections in the first head-to-head evaluation of its kind. The model, called OtoDX, was more than 95 percent accurate in diagnosing an ear infection in a set of 22 test images compared to 65 percent accuracy among a group of clinicians who reviewed the same images.

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Scientists have demonstrated that the APOE4 gene variant, which increases risk for Alzheimer’s but decreases risk of glaucoma in humans, blocks a disease cascade that leads to the destruction of retinal ganglion cells in glaucoma. Additionally, they showed in mouse models that the death of retinal ganglion cells – the cause of vision loss in glaucoma – can be prevented by using medications to inhibit a molecule called Galectin-3, which is regulated by the APOE gene. These findings taken together emphasize the critical role of APOE in glaucoma and suggest that Galectin-3 inhibitors hold promise as a glaucoma treatment, according to the authors.

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Mass Eye and Ear researchers in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories have been awarded a five-year, $12.5 million P50 Clinical Research Center Grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicable Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institute of Health (NIH) to continue their research on cochlear synaptopathy, or hidden hearing loss, a type of hearing damage first discovered at Mass Eye and Ear in 2009. Funding from the grant extends support of four projects that aim to clarify the prevalence, nature and functional consequences of hidden hearing loss in humans.

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Researchers from Mass Eye and Ear have developed a word-score model capable of estimating the amount of hidden hearing loss in human ears. This form of hearing loss is caused by cochlear nerve degeneration, and is not detected by standard audiogram tests.

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Scientists from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a first-of-its-kind cross-tissue cell atlas, and in collaboration with researchers at Mass Eye and Ear, have uncovered new clues for specific cell types and genes involved in complex diseases. In a new study published May 12 in Science, researchers described for the first time how their novel cross-tissue cell atlas derived from an analysis of nuclei from 25 frozen samples from 8 tissue types may increase understanding of the cellular and genetic underpinnings of complex diseases, including heart disease and cancers.

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A surgically implanted device that moves the tongue forward during sleep was found to safely and effectively reduce sleep apnea in adolescents with Down syndrome, according to a new study published April 21 in JAMA Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery.

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Mass Eye and Ear research shows the viral vector Anc80L65 efficiently transferred genetic cargo into the inner ear of nonhuman primates via a specialized surgical procedure, paving the way for a method that can be brought to clinical trials for hearing loss and vestibular disorder treatments.

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New research shows liquid biopsy for HPV-associated head and neck cancer is more than 98% accurate and obtained a diagnosis 26 days quicker on average than conventional tissue biopsy, in addition to costing 38% less. With HPV-associated head and neck cancer rates on the rise, there is a great need for more accurate, less-invasive, faster and less expensive diagnostic tests.

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Pernell T. Reid, MD, MHA, MS, an experienced health care administrator with nearly two decades of practice management and financial leadership experience in academic medicine, is joining Mass Eye and Ear (a member hospital of Mass General Brigham) as Senior Vice President of the Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS).

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Researchers have identified the mechanism that can lead to deafness in the rare syndrome, Norrie disease, which may lead to promising treatment targets for the incurable disease and other forms of profound hearing loss.

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Laryngology researcher Kristina Simonyan, MD, PhD, Dr med, of Mass Eye and Ear, has been awarded an $11.9 million P50 Clinical Research Center Grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicable Disorders to form a new multidisciplinary center across four academic medical institutions that will be committed to conducting research on laryngeal dystonia and voice tremor, two debilitating neurological voice disorders.

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Gene-based, single-dose AAVCOVID vaccine shown to offer disease protection in challenge study, and to elicit year-long immune response, according to new paper in Cell Host & Microbe.