Role of microRNA in inner ear stem cells and related research progress

Deafness is one of the major global health problems that seriously affects the quality of human life. At present, there are no successful treatments for deafness caused by cochlear hair cell (HC) damage. The irreversibility of mammalian hearing impairment is that the inner ear's sensory epithelium cannot repair lost hair cells and neurons through spontaneous regeneration. The goal of stem cell therapy for sensorineural hearing loss is to reconstruct the damaged inner ear structure and achieve functional repair. microRNA (miRNA), as a class of highly conserved endogenous non-coding small RNAs, plays an important role in the development of cochlea and HCs. miRNA also participates in the regulation of stem cell proliferation and differentiation, and plays an important role in the process of regeneration of inner ear HCs, miRNA has a broad application prospect of clinical treatment of hearing loss, which is conducive to solving the medical problem of inner ear HC regeneration.