A 3D-printed microneedle to treat hearing loss

Amazing stuff! Can you hear me now!

"... We’re now on the cusp of gene therapies that can restore hearing by regenerating cells in our ears that we lose after years of exposure to loud noises. But we really don’t have a way to deliver those therapies in a precise, predictable, and safe way.

That’s because these cells are inside an almost inaccessible container in the inner ear called the cochlea. The cochlea is a spiral-shaped, fluid-filled bone, the hardest bone in our bodies

There is a tiny membrane—about 2 mm wide—in the cochlea that could theoretically give us access. But the membrane invariably rips when you try to make an opening with standard surgical tools. When that happens, you could permanently lose your hearing and sense of balance.

So that’s one reason we’ve been working on this microneedle: to introduce therapies into the cochlea without ripping the membrane. ...

a 3D printing method became available and that was the enabling technology. Two photon photolithography allows a so-called voxel resolution of around 200 nanometers, about a 10th of a percent of the diameter of a hair, very, very small. With that we can print needles that are extremely sharp and are made from polymers, like the epoxy you can buy in a hardware store. Our needles are many times sharper than any commercially available needle. ..."

The Most Interesting Needle in the World? | Columbia University Irving Medical Center "Future treatments for hearing loss—including gene therapy—could come to rely on a tiny 3D-printed microneedle designed by a close-knit team of Columbia physicians and engineers."

The dual-lumen microneedle as seen through an electron microscope