Dr. Konstantina Stankovic

And we talked about good diet, lifestyle, exercise.

If you exercise during the day, you'll sleep better, so you don't need these other

band-aids, really.

So then it's considering the whole patient, their needs, their priorities, their lifestyle, and helping them understand how to manage that in the healthiest way possible.

Because we really aim to keep people healthy as opposed to

letting them get sick and that sickness getting out of control and then trying to fix the problem because then it's a much more challenging problem to fix.

Even we're talking about the auditory system.

It's much easier to intervene if these cells are still there.

As opposed to if they are gone.

If they are gone, they do not spontaneously regenerate in mammals.

However, in birds, and you talked about birds and songbirds.

Yes, indeed.

And numerous studies have shown that birds...

Birds really regenerate their hair cells.

And one of our investigators at Stanford, Stefan Heller, recently published a paper describing the specific pathways that are absolutely essential for this in birds.

So in birds, we really have nailed it in terms of understanding the specifics.

And birds do it quickly.

They regenerate their hair cells within days.

Within a month, they're done.

But humans don't.