Sensori-neural hearing loss (SNHL) represents a major public health problem and the most common sensory deficit in humans, affecting 1 in 1000 newborns and a significant portion of the elderly population. In most cases, SNHL is associated with a permanent loss of auditory hair cells (HCs) within the cochlea (the auditory part of the inner ear) and can be caused by either environmental (i.e. exposure to noise, ototoxic drugs, aging...) or genetic factors. In mammals, including human, the cochlear HCs are not replaced and the resulting hearing loss is often irreversible. The objective of this project is to contribute to the emergence of a stem cell-based therapy to treat SNHL which still actually beyond therapeutic intervention. To reach our objective, we will develop innovative experimental protocols to derive HC progenitors from both embryonic stem cells and inner ear tissue-stem cells in standardized cell culture models. Then, we will characterize these inner ear sensory progenitors at the molecular and cellular levels. In the last step, we will explore their transplantation capacities to induce regeneration of functional HCs in both in vitro and in vivo models of SNHL.

Reading is a complex cultural skill which plays a central role in an individual’s everyday life. It is permitted through the movements of our eyes along the lines of text, and depends on perceptual and cognitive processes as well as low-level visuo-motor processes associated with saccade programming. The aim of the present proposal is to investigate the interplay between visual, cognitive and oculomotor processes in order to develop a complete and realistic model of eye-movement control during expert reading that will serve, in a long term run, as a basis for the study of impaired reading and dyslexia. Several models of eye-movement control in reading have already been proposed, including SWIFT that was developed by the German partner; these consider that ongoing cognitive processes are the main driving force of the eyes. Proposed research will contrast the predictions of SWIFT with predictions of other cognitive models (e.g. E-Z Reader) as well as predictions from an alternative model which assumes that the spatial characteristics of eye movements are mainly under low-level visuo-motor control. This model is based on research conducted by the French partner, and it will be developed in a joint manner by French and German partners. Model testing will consist mainly of investigating the universality across languages and reading tasks of the effects of cognitive and visuo-motor variables on eye behaviour in reading. A corpus of eye-movement data will be collected in French, and crosslanguage comparisons will be conducted on the basis on data collected by the German partner as well as other partners in the larger European project.