Drugmakers step up search for hearing loss medicines

When Swiss biotech firm Auris Medical wanted to recruit patients to test its experimental hearing loss drug, it decided to enlist partygoers deafened by firecrackers on New Year's Eve.

In the weeks leading up to December 31, 2005 it advertised in the subway and on radio stations in Munich and Berlin, urging victims of sudden firecracker-induced hearing loss to turn up at designated clinics for treatment on January 1.

"We had just one single day of enrolment, we didn't know how many people would show up," Thomas Meyer, managing director of Auris, told Reuters.

Luckily, his gamble paid off and the small private company is now one of the leaders in what has been an empty space for the pharmaceutical industry.

Auris managed to recruit enough people to show that its compound AM-111 posed no safety risk and has since successfully completed a mid-stage trial in acute sensorineural hearing loss, or sudden deafness, involving 210 patients.

While there is no guarantee that its drug, which is injected through the eardrum, will pass muster in final-stage tests, the progress by Auris and a clutch of rival biotech firms is making large pharmaceutical companies sit up and take notice.

There are currently no approved disease-modifying drugs for hearing loss, which affects nearly a third of people aged 65 to 74 and half of those over 75.

But the science is developing and investor interest is growing, piqued by the huge commercial success of recent new treatments for sight loss, such as Lucentis from Novartis and Roche and Eylea from Regeneron and Bayer.

British charity Action on Hearing Loss conservatively puts the potential Western market for new drugs at $4.6 billion a year - a figure that could grow quickly as ageing populations swell the ranks of those with hearing problems.

NEGLECTED FIELD

"It's one of the few areas that, as yet, hasn't really been tackled by the drugs industry," said Kate Bingham, managing partner at SV Life Sciences Advisers, a venture capital firm with investments in new drugs for both eyes and ears.

Bingham sits on the board of Autifony Therapeutics - a hearing loss firm spun out of GlaxoSmithKline in which the British drugmaker retains a stake.

Historically, hearing loss has received little attention from Big Pharma, given the lack of obvious targets for drug intervention, the difficulties of running clinical trials and a widespread belief that most deafness could not be reversed.

Now the big companies are getting involved, although the work is early-stage.

"A drug that is therapeutic and priced right could be quite a blockbuster. That's why they've put their toe in the water," said Jonathan Kil, chief medical officer at Seattle-based Sound Pharmaceuticals, which is enrolling young iPod users in a trial of an oral drug for noise-induced hearing loss.