New material could offer hope to those with no voice
Don't give up hope. Medical technology has come a long way and the best is yet to come. I've moved on from developing cardiac devices and am now on the forefront of implantables and devices for microsurgery and implantable biologics.The team led by Langer and Zeitels has now developed a polymer gel that they hope to start testing in a small clinical trial next year. The gel, which mimics key traits of human vocal cords, could help millions of people with voice disorders—not just singers such as Andrews and Steven Tyler, another patient of Zeitels'.
About 6% of the U.S. population has some kind of voice disorder, and the majority of those cases involve scarring of the vocal cords, says Sandeep Karajanagi, a former MIT researcher who developed the gel while working as a postdoc in the Langer lab. Many of those are children whose cords are scarred from intubation during surgery, while others are victims of laryngeal cancer.
Other people who could benefit are those with voices strained from overuse, such as teachers. “This would be so valuable to society, because every time a person loses their voice, say, a teacher or a politician, all of their contributions get lost to society, because they can’t communicate their ideas,” Zeitels says.
