Make Waves: Inside the Gene Therapy Bringing Natural Hearing to Deaf Children

You’ve all seen the videos—the heart-melting, tear-jerking ones where a deaf child is sitting in a doctor’s office as their cochlear implant is turned on for the first time. Almost immediately, their eyes light up, parents start crying—you start crying. Lawrence R. Lustig, MD, professor and chairman of otolaryngology, head, and neck surgery at Columbia University Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital, has witnessed this remarkable experience many times.

That isn’t what happens with the deaf children who received DB-OTO, a gene therapy developed by Regeneron that aims to treat profound congenital deafness caused by mutations in the otoferlin ( OTOF ) gene. Lustig didn’t see an immediate reaction. In fact, he didn’t see anything.

But days and weeks later, he started getting v