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Notes From the Field and Clinic Physician-scientists bring multiple perspectives to treating patients and conducting research. By Ronna Hertzano, M.D., Ph.D.
Training in the gEAR—a tool that provides intuitive visualization, analysis, and sharing of gene expression data—occurred at the last in-person Association for Research in Otolaryngology MidWinter Meeting, in early 2020.
I am an otolaryngologist surgeon-scientist. My clinical practice focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the ear, with an emphasis on hearing restoration. As such, I see and treat patients of all ages who suffer from hereditary and nonhereditary auditory (hearing) and vestibular (balance) dysfunction. Over 60 percent of my time is dedicated to research, where my goal is to make significant contributions toward the treatment of congenital and acquired auditory and vestibular dysfunction. Toward hearing restoration, I work to unravel the regulatory signaling cascades that lead to the proper development of the ear, specifically sensory hair cells in the inner ear. I lead a collaborative team that develops and applies a variety of approaches for cell type-specific, multi-omic analyses of the ear. We couple the results of these studies with state-ofthe-art informatics analyses to identify key regulators of gene expression in hair cell development, and cell type-specific signaling cascades in acquired hearing loss (e.g., from excess noise or aging). Several years ago, I realized that the lack of intuitive tools for the noninformatics–trained biologists for visualization and analysis of omics data presents a major barrier to the effective dissemination, sharing, and analysis of expression data by cellular and molecular biologists. This led to the inception and development of the gEAR (gene Expression for Analysis Resource), a tool that provides intuitive visualization, analysis, and sharing of gene expression data. Hearing Health Foundation (HHF)’s Hearing Restoration Project helped provide seed funding for the platform. The gEAR portal allows anybody in the scientific community who is studying noise-induced hearing loss seamless access to our dataset without having to download the data and format it. They can also analyze the data using the gEAR.
Two Ways of Thinking
I believe all physician-scientists (also called clinician-researchers) share the dream of helping to advance how we treat human diseases. We also share the path—which includes active listening to patients, creative thinking, lab meeting discussions, forming collaborations, and staying at the forefront of research. Ideally we’ll be able to develop experiments in model organisms followed up by clinical studies among the patient population. 14
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