Evaluating sheep as a large animal model in hearing & balance research

Bioengineers WANTED! In this talk, we will share our ongoing research work and highlight some challenges in the field in hope to hear innovative solutions from ABI! Hearing loss affects 1.5 Billion people worldwide, majority of this caused by pathologies in the inner ear. There is no treatment that can effectively prevent or reverse the inner ear pathology. Key limitation in the field is the lack of clinical tools to deliver drugs to the inner ear, or to diagnose the inner ear pathologies of individual cases. We hope to contribute to solving these limitations by establishing the sheep as a large animal preclinical model suitable for developing new clinical tools for inner ear therapeutics. The aim of this study was to characterize the aspects of sheep cochlea to allow us to make comparison to those of human and rodents. We have combined imaging modalities (confocal microscopy, MRI and microCT) to characterized the geometry of cochlea and vestibular systems of sheep with the most focus on the round window, the membrane-covered opening and the presumed path for therapeutic agent to enter the cochlea. We are now using the sheep as the model platform to develop new drug delivery methodology.