(The Center Square) – Researchers at Washington State University have announced a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for researching hearing loss related to drugs used to treat COVID-19.
“We already know some antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs can cause hearing loss. What we don’t know is what other medications are out there that can cause mild to moderate hearing loss,” neuroscientist and researcher Allison Coffin told the school newspaper WSU Insider.
Though there are currently no confirmed reports of COVID-19 medications causing hearing loss, there are more than 900 news drugs to treat the virus either on the shelves or in clinical trials.
Coffin, who spent the last 15 years looking into medication-induced hearing loss, knows that side effects related to hearing loss can be notoriously difficult to detect due to slow progression over long periods of time.
In an effort to solve this problem, Coffin does her research on zebrafish in a lab environment. This means she can conduct research much more quickly as compared to human trials that would typically take years or even decades to complete.
“We use larval fish, literally the size of a swimming human eyelash,” she explained in a phone call with The Center Square. “For us they’re incredibly useful because they have hearing cells on the outside of the body.”
She bathes the zebrafish in a combination of medication and dye to track the progression of the drug through the cell structure.
By mixing medications used to treat COVID-19 with water-filled dishes holding eyelash-sized zebrafish, Coffin can determine if hearing cells or the synapse, a connection from the cell to the nerve connected to the brain, are damaged or dead.
In this research, WSU has a partner in the private sector: Portland-based Rewire AI, founded as Rewire Neuroscience.
According to its website, Rewire is a “private company dedicated to making scientific discovery more accessible and efficient through a focused product line with the mission of providing integrated AI for biomedical image analysis that improves the pace, ease, and reproducibility of scientific research.”
In this instance, that means using artificial intelligence and computer science to look at drugs with a similar makeup to those that cause hearing loss, providing further avenues of research.
“[In partnership with Rewire AI] we developed a dataset of drugs known to cause hearing loss and known ear safe drugs, and we can use that model not just for COVID drugs but to look at others as well,” Coffin told The Center Square, adding the machine learning model could have broad applications for drug research and development and overall public health.
