Gene Therapy Restored Hearing in Deaf Child

An experimental gene therapy gave a deaf child the ability to hear, her family and investigators for a clinical trial say. Opal Sandy, the girl, received an injection of DB-OTO, Regeneron’s gene therapy, in her ear when she was 11 months old. Her hearing was assessed as normal within six months. “When Opal could first hear us clapping unaided it was mind-blowing,” Jo Sandy, the girl’s mother, said in a statement released by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Opal can now hear her parents and responds with words such as “Dada,” according to her parents. “Providing the full complexity and spectrum of sound in children born with profound genetic deafness is a phenomenon I did not expect to see in my lifetime,” Dr. Lawrence Lustig, chair of Columbia University’s Department of Otolaryngology and one of the trial investigators, said in a statement....