Postdoctoral trainee Choongheon Lee & Neuroscience Graduate Program student Anjali Sinha lead new research focused on the entry of drugs into the inner ear

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The study, titled Characterizing the Access of Cholinergic Antagonists to Referent Synapses in the Inner Ear, looks to understand the rules governing drug entry into peripheral sensory end organs.

Vestibular and auditory dysfunction and their associated clinical manifestations represent a significant and increasing health burden, according to Lee and his team. Selective pharmacological targeting of distinct cellular mechanisms in the inner ear, while avoiding similar targets in the central nervous system (CNS), might offer a set of viable clinical tools and specific treatment strategies.

Pharmacological targeting of the peripheral vestibular and auditory system can be utilized to develop novel clinical approaches to alleviate a number of inner ear maladies including dizziness, vertigo, and hearing loss.

In this work, the team utilized a combination of vestibular and auditory recordings in mice to reveal that different pharmacological agents, with little to no CNS access, can in fact reach cellular targets in the inner ear.

These data have exciting implications about how we might leverage drug design and drug delivery measures to combat inner ear dysfunction,” says Lee.

Check out the full article in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Charged drugs, like glycopyrrolate, can selectively modulate peripheral vestibular function in a mouse model and may be used to alleviate some forms of dizziness.