Stem cells provide sound in vitro models for deafness
- published on Stem Cell Reports - (PDF)

Drs. Ichiro Fukunaga, Katsuhisa Ikeda, Kazusaku Kamiya from Juntendo University published an epoch-making report on Stem Cell Reports (published online: 11 November 2016).
Drs. Osamu Minowa and Tetsuo Noda from Team for Advanced Development and Evaluation of Human Disease Models in RIKEN BRC joined this research as collaborators.

This study presented high-impact outcome in the context of both medical application and basic science, as it mainly includes novel approach toward regenerative medicine for congenital deafness using highly sophisticated differentiation system in vitro, which is also of great use to study these developmental processes in vivo.

RIKEN BRC staff members were in charge of the following:
・Analyzing hereditary deaf mouse model (confirmation of phenotype at its early stage)
・Supporting maintenance of the model mouse line
・Preliminary test for searching modifier factors of the deafness phenotype.