New compounds to protect hearing during aminoglycoside therapy - safety study

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Aminoglycoside antibiotics (AGs) are important for the treatment of a variety of serious infectious diseases including septicemia, complicated intra-abdominal infections, complicated urinary tract infections, and nosocomial respiratory tract infections. AGs are the mainstay of treating Pseudomonas infection in patients with cystic fibrosis and one of the best classes of medication for treating multiple drug resistant TB throughout the world. AGs would be even more widelyused today if it were not for the fact that as many as 20% of patients treated with AGs develop measurable irreversible hearing loss and a significant fraction of these people become functionally deaf. This side effect, called ototoxicity, has made what would otherwise be a cheap and effective antibiotic into a treatment of last resort. Screening chemicals in a zebrafish model has identified a small molecule compound that has been shown to prevent hair cell death in the zebrafish and also to be effect