On Wednesday, Larry Lustig, an otolaryngologist at Columbia University, presented clinical trial data of two children with profound deafness-the most severe type of deafness-who are now able to hear at normal levels after receiving an experimental gene therapy. On Thursday, Yilai Shu, an otolaryngologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, provided a one-year progress report on six children who were treated in the first in-human trial of gene therapy for genetic therapy. Lustig calls it a “Jumping point.” Now that researchers have shown that this gene therapy can work, “This is going to really spark, we hope, the development of gene therapy for more common types of deafness,” he said.

Source: More children gain hearing as gene therapy for profound deafness advances