looks like their using nonobots to explore/treat cochlia et al stuff

There is definitely some amazing research going on. Did you know that the NIH did not have an institute within that studied communication disorders until 1988? Most of the other institutes within the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda MD had been in place for a century by then. Research in this area is relatively new. The prevailing attitude prior to the late 70s when the cochlear implant concept was being considered, was that deafness could never be cured. Much has changed through remedial procedures, but science is still looking for a true 'cure'.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to attend a symposium featuring scientists working with the Hearing Health Foundation. One of the more interesting pieces of that presentation was hearing that until recently, researchers in this area had not been working collaboratively. They were more or less in competition with each other. The Hearing Health Foundation had encouraged them to come together to share their discoveries and observations. Because this was happening, the perspective on potentially finding a cure for sensorineural hearing loss was changing and becoming more positive. HHF publishes an excellent quarterly magazine that features research and personal stories about people who live with hearing loss. You may wish to subscribe to that publication. There is no fee to subscribe at: http://www.hhf.org/subscribe

thanks for info. what I am wondering about is what the possibilities are for cochlear replacement. as laymen, I dont know the technical issues, but seems to me that transferring mechanical sound waves into electrical pulses should not be problem. how do you interface the pulses with the neurons that carry the sound message up to the line into the brain is the issue. I guess its the same problem with artificial limbs. how do you get the electrical/mechanical stuff to talk to the neural message carriers.

check out https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190805101127.htm some more new research

You are talking engineering and science. Good questions.

just finished reading about circuit breakers in cochlea (avoid loud noises, like 90mm rounds) , pretty good engineering.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/hearing-acrobatics

I like this thread! I follow sensorineural hearing loss research (and also tinnitus research) rather heavily.

RE: "what's happening with... [some promising new treatment/mechanism]?"

A good way to find new research related to the article @awilst posted (or any article on PubMed)... is to click on the "Cited By" link.

It usually appears above the abstract, within this text: "See other articles in PMC that cite the published article."

Clicking on the link will bring you to a list of research articles that reference the article in question.

Here is the link to the "Cited By" page for the nano-based inner ear drug delivery article that was posted in this thread:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4940320/citedby/
As you can see, that "Cited By" page lists 17 articles related to the older paper... a handful of which are from 2020. Very fresh!

Another way to keep up with hearing loss research in general (mainly research that relates to regeneration/restoration) is the Research section on this page I made:
https://www.hearinglosstreatmentreport.com/#research
It is a non-commercial page and an easy way to track interesting new research articles. There is also a clinical trials section that tracks human trials. I am working on a Grant/Project tracker to list hearing restoration projects involving NIH Funds. The way it works is, I made a system that monitors PubMed and dozens of hearing-related journals, checking for articles that meet certain criteria and keywords (e.g. sensorineural hearing loss therapeutics, inner ear hair cell restoration, and many others). I also manually review the collected articles to maintain quality (although all links are gathered exclusively from trusted journals).

thanks, lots of info. I have started reading.