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New Working Groups Reaffirm Team Science Approach
By Lisa Goodrich, Ph.D.
This year’s annual meeting of the Hearing Restoration Project (HRP) was held over two days in mid-March 2021 via Zoom, like most scientific (and other) events over the past year and a half, and was also the first annual meeting I oversaw as the HRP’s new scientific director. This presented an opportunity to assess and reimagine the group’s structures, processes, and ethos, even as the consortium’s end goal—to discover mechanisms to regenerate inner ear hair cells in humans to cure hearing loss and related disorders—remains the same. A few years ago, the consortium decided to shift from proposals with multiple principal investigators (PI) to single-PI projects. The logic was straightforward: The outcomes of a few focused projects would help the HRP to refine its targets, and there is always a finite pool of funding available in any given year. The consortium and the Scientific Advisory Board (on which I sat before becoming HRP scientific director) must make difficult decisions about which experiments and projects are most urgent and promising. At the same time, the HRP is founded on a firm belief in the advantages of team science and a conviction that collaboration and exchange produce the best results. In surveying the group’s recent accomplishments, we agreed that we needed a new approach to mine our rich datasets and begin to directly test ways to regenerate hair cells in vivo. We also reiterated our commitment to facilitate hair cell regeneration research more broadly by making the data available to anyone in the field, as enabled by the gEAR platform, whose creation the HRP funded.
We agreed that we needed a new approach to mine our rich datasets and begin to directly test ways to regenerate hair cells in vivo. 36
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We decided to form three working groups that will each submit one joint proposal per grant cycle. These working groups span the breadth of the HRP’s work as guided by its strategic plan: » The Cross-Species Epigenetic Analysis working group is producing epigenetic data sets for supporting cells in order to pinpoint the differences between successful regeneration in fish and chicks, and failure to regenerate (so far) in mammals; » The Integrative Analysis working group promotes data sharing, conducts cross-species analysis of data, and aims to more efficiently prepare data for publication; » The Reprogramming and Gene Delivery working group will test transcription factors to regenerate hair cells and develop new tools and methods to deliver these transcription factors to the inner ear. Every HRP member has a role to play, and our new comfort with Zoom meetings will make it that much easier to bring HRP investigators and members of their labs together on a regular basis. This restructuring of the HRP’s team science approach will reinvigorate the collaborative spirit and propel our work forward in new, creative ways. This renewed impetus should result more concretely in accelerated publication plans and, over a slightly longer term, additional major funding awards to members’ labs from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to continue initial HRP research. I look forward to sharing details on the working groups’ projects and results as we embark on this exciting next phase of the HRP.
HRP scientific director Lisa Goodrich, Ph.D., is a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. For more, see hhf.org/hrp.
