Lab Update – Rick Nelson, MD, Phd

NIH grant to study TMPRSS3-related hearing loss Laboratory of Rick Nelson

Rick Nelson, MD, PhD, is a surgeon-scientist who received a $3M grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health to study TMPRSS3-related hearing loss.

Genetic variants in the TMPRSS3 gene can lead to both congenital and early life onset of hearing loss and TMPRSS3-related hearing loss is one of the most common causes of hearing loss in patients undergoing cochlear implantation. These studies will elucidate the mechanism of how loss of TMPRSS3 leads to hearing loss in addition to the development of treatments to replace the gene which preliminary data show improvement in hearing in model organisms.

Nelson’s laboratory published results in the Journal of Medical Genetics in 2022, which resolves a long-debated topic of where TMPRSS3 is expressed and how it impacts cochlear implant outcomes. They demonstrated that TMPRSS3 expression is limited to the sensory cells within the cochlea and not the hearing nerve. This has clinical implications for patients with TMPRSS-related hearing loss who are considering cochlear implantation.