Description: A life science start-up, which promotes the development, production and marketing of multichannel optogenetic stimulation and behavioral biology equipment for biomedical research. The company's long-term goal is to develop the optical cochlear implant (CI) as a medical device.
implant (640) implantat (426) cochlea (13) tobias moser (4) ulrich schwarz (3) optogentech (2) daniel keppeler (2) christian goßler (2) optogenetik (2) gehörschnecke (2)
A silver lining for profoundly hearing impaired and deaf people
Optogenetics - the optical control of genetically modified cells with light - is a rapidly developing approach that is revolutionizing the life sciences with photonic methods. In contrast to the established, clinically widespread electrical cell stimulation (cochlear implant, cardiac pacemaker, deep brain stimulation), optogenetics allows cell type-specific and spatially confined optical control of cell activity.
Cochlear implants are prostheses that enable the deaf to hear again. The electric cochlea implant (eCI) already allows hearing impaired people to participate in vocal communication in their daily lives again. There are more than 700,000 eCI users worldwide. The bottleneck of hearing with an electrical cochlear implant is the broad spread of the current stimulus in the cochlea. If one compares the cochlea in the inner ear with a spiral staircase where each step corresponds to a pitch, each of the 12-24 eCI