Canlon Barbara
The 2023 FPA Scientific Grand Prize is awarded to Prof. Barbara Canlon for her discovery of the cochlear circadian clock machinery, which modulates cochlear physiology throughout the day. This novel finding changed the ways of thinking about auditory function and its treatments, and her discoveries could influence public health policy and general public awareness.
HER RESEARCH
Barbara Canlon is a Professor of Hearing Physiology at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. She serves as the Administrative Head of Experimental Audiology, leading an auditory neuroscience interdisciplinary research group.
Throughout her career, Prof. Canlon focused on understanding the mechanisms of inner ear damage and developing strategies to prevent and treat cochlear injury. Combining disciplines and designing novel technologies and experimental approaches with international and interdisciplinary partnerships, her investigations over the last decades have unraveled some of the mysteries of noise trauma.
The ear chronobiology
The production of most hormones is controlled by biological rhythms, also known as circadian rhythms. Their secretion varies according to the time of day over a 24-hour cycle, thanks to a biological clock located in our brain. Prof. Canlon investigated whether the cells of the cochlea are also subject to circadian rhythms. Her groundbreaking work revealed previously unknown mechanisms: the expression of genes in the inner ear and its function are controlled by a biological clock. She also demonstrated that hearing sensitivity fluctuates throughout the day and night in mice, with greater vulnerability to noise damage during the night, the active phase for these rodents.
Building on her discovery, Prof. Canlon tested in mice pharmacological strategies to help protect the ear from acoustic trauma. It appears that some corticoids are effective for protecting the ear when administered at night, others during the day. Preliminary experiments led in Canlon’s laboratory on human cochlear tissue samples indicated that this circadian regulation could exist in humans, with certain auditory proteins activated during the daytime and others during the night time.
By illuminating the influence of circadian cycle on auditory physiology and the recovery after noise trauma, Barbara Canlon’s findings have profoundly changed the way the auditory field thinks about hearing, hearing loss and its protection. In particular, chronotherapeutic** approaches could optimize the treatment of hearing disorders: in taking into account the cochlear circadian rhythms, administration of drugs at the proper time of the day could increase their efficacy and prevent side effects.
These major discoveries about the importance of biological rhythms in the physiology of the inner ear could have repercussions on public health policies, as well as on prevention aimed at the general public with crucial stakes in working environments.
Circadian: used to characterize biological rhythms, cycles of about 24 hours
Barbara Canlon got her Master of Science in Biochemistry at the University of Michigan in 1984. She went to Karolinska Institutet, in Stockholm, in the laboratory of Pr. Ake Flock, a specialist of physiological studies of the inner ear. In 1988, she moved to Paris (France) for post-doctoral training in Jean-Pierre Changeux's laboratory at Institut Pasteur, and in 1989 in Prof. Joël Bockaert's laboratory in Montpellier (France). At the same time, she became a Research assistant for the Swedish Medical Research Council at Karolinska Institutet. In 1991, she becomes Assistant professor and establishes her own team "Experimental Audiology". She is appointed as member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2020 and named Professor in 2002.
Barbara Canlon is also the Editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Hearing research. She received the the Alvarengas Prize from the Swedish Medical Society in 1990 and the Knowles Prize for Distinguished Achievement en 2020.