Tiny ear implants spun by silkworms help restore hearing

In a first, scientists have used silkworms to create a tiny silk implant that can enable a person's damaged eardrum to heal and help restore their hearing.     

Chronic Middle Ear Disease and the ensuing perforated eardrums – commonly known as "burst eardrums" – impact millions around the world, reducing hearing and causing complications, including infections, which take the lives of nearly 30,000 people every year.     
The infection can be difficult to contain, resulting in damage to the eardrum and mastoid bone with hearing loss and pain occurring within the ear. Scientists are now closer to restoring hearing to patients with painful damaged eardrums by combining science and silkworms to create a tiny device known as ClearDrum which is similar in appearance and size to a contact lens.     

The technique is the result of exhaustive design, manufacturing, testing and analysis, researchers said.  

The team, led by Marcus Atlas from Ear Science Institute Australia, has created a tiny bio-compatible silk implant on which the patient's own cells grow and flourish resulting in a healed eardrum. Tested over numerous years, the implant shows the ability to perform even better than a person's original eardrum.   

Atlas said that the bio-compatibility, strength and transparency of the implant provides an advantage for the patient that has never been seen before. The reduced complexity and time within surgery provides an even greater advantage and will allow the implant to be used in more cases and by more surgeons in more countries than current solutions.     

The current surgical procedures used for repairing perforated eardrums involves making grafts from the patient's own tissues and using specialised and delicate microsurgery techniques and applying them to the eardrum to close the hole.     

The patient is quite often required to return to surgery for further procedures due to limitations of the current methods. The new process is expected to be less expensive, less invasive and promising quicker healing of the ear drum. 

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New antibiotic gel may cure ear infections in children

A single dose of a bioengineered gel, developed by US researchers, could deliver a full course of antibiotic therapy for a common childhood ear infection, a preclinical study has found. Middle-ear infection, or otitis media, is an ear infection that is usually caused by bacteria or viruses. Common symptoms include ear pain and fever and in some cases, it may also cause drainage of fluid from the ear or hearing loss. Although most ear ifections go away on their own, some require antibiotics.

As high doses of oral antibiotics are needed to get to the ear, side effects like diarrhea, rashes and oral thrush are common. “With oral antibiotics, you have to treat the entire body repeatedly just to get to the middle ear,” said Rong Yang, Ph.D., a chemical engineer at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, US. However, “with the gel, a paediatrician can administer the entire antibiotic course all at once, and only where it’s needed,” Yang said.

Squirted into the ear canal, the gel quickly hardens and stays in place, gradually dispensing antibiotics across the eardrum into the middle ear. “Our technology gets things across the eardrum that don’t usually get across in sufficient quantity to be therapeutic,” added Daniel Kohane from Boston Children’s Hospital.

 Previously, the eardrum (also called the tympanic membrane) was an impenetrable barrier, but the bioengineered gel gets drugs past it with the help of chemical permeation enhancers (CPEs). The CPEs insert themselves into the membrane, opening up molecular pores that allow the antibiotics to seep through to the eardrum’s outermost layer.

“Transtympanic delivery of antibiotics to the middle ear has the potential to enable children to benefit from the rapid antibacterial activity of antimicrobial agents without systemic exposure and could reduce emergence of resistant microbes,” noted Stephen Pelton, paediatrician at Boston Medical Center.

The findings, published by the journal Science Translational Medicine, have led to better, easier and potentially safer treatment for middle ear infections, the researchers concluded
 

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