#Facultyseminars: Learning from vestibular toxicity models to understand the basis of sensory decline

The vestibular system in the inner ear provides the sense of balance with important functions in motor control and cognition. It encodes head accelerations by the transducing action of its sensory hair cells. In mammals, hair cells are post-mitotic and do not regenerate, so hair cell loss causes permanent dysfunction. This seminar will provide an overview of our long-term research on vestibular physiopathology. Main sections will be the discovery of new animal models of vestibular toxicity, the development of methods to assess vestibular function in animals, the establishment of relationships between ear damage and function loss, the discovery of reversible damage in hair cells under chronic toxic exposure, the establishment of a 3D in vitro model to study persistent stress in the system, and the identification of the hair cell’s susceptibility to major inflammatory factors. Our recent data may open a new path to understand the factors involved in sensory decline in late adulthood.

Dr. Ana Mendez – Cellular and molecular basis of sensory disorders group

Jordi Llorens is Full Professor in Physiology at the University of Barcelona (UB). He received his PhD in Biological Sciences from the UB with a thesis in the field of behavioral toxicology. He did post-doctoral research at the US Environmental Protection Agency in the Research triangle Park, at the INSERM in Montpellier, and at the CSIC in Barcelona. He joined the Bellvitge Campus of the UB in 1996 as Assistant Professor and PI, becoming Associate Professor in 2001 and Full Professor in 2011. He has been working on the vestibular system since 1992, when he moved to Montpellier to prove that vestibular damage was the underlying cause of the permanent motor syndrome caused in rats by a toxic compound. In recent years, his research on chronic vestibular stress is shifting his interest from hair cell death to hair cell sickness.