SoundBites’ origin dates back to the auditory neuroscience research by Dr. Josef Miller at the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. Shortly after, he became director at the Kresge Hearing Research Institute. Dr Miller, who preferred to go by Joe, had a hunch that hearing loss could be explained biologically. Decades later, his hunch was correct, and his proposed solution worked.
In 2010, Barry Seifer joined Soundbites Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), which holds the exclusive patent license to the ACEMg hearing preservation biomedicine developed at the University of Michigan Medical School. Since 2010, Seifer, the CEO of Soundbites has been working in translational research to bring ACEMg out of Dr. Miller’s laboratory and into the market.
Soundbites has developed a supplement that if taken daily, can improve and maintain hearing. Its proprietary high-potency ACEMg formulation of antioxidants vitamins A, C, and E and the vasodilator magnesium developed by Dr. Miller has demonstrated to protect against noise-induced hearing loss. The micronutrient formula ACEMg was developed to block the initiating biological events that trigger Sensorineural Hearing Loss (SNHL), an inner ear metabolic stress disorder, such as loud noise and other environmental causes.
“The formula sounds very simple, but it's really a very elegant solution to a very complex biomedical problem,” said Seifer.
One major hurdle Seifer mentioned was finding money for research—something that is hard to come by in the United States.
“There isn't a lot of money,” he said. “There's not a lot of incentive for basic research. If you do get that far and you get something that does seem to work, you still have another very large obstacle to get it through translational research, which is fragmented and suboptimal in the United States, but is funded in Europe through the European Commission. And that's why we went to Europe. They offered us a lot of money, $6.5 million to do more translational research.”
In true European form, Seifer conducted his research at a dance party in Amsterdam—an event that marked the beginning of the company's entry into real-world data.
On a ferry blasting electronic music, Seifer’s team handed out Soundbites. To his surprise, the festival goers wanted more.
“It didn't occur to us until later in the morning, after midnight—my phone started to blow up from our own staff who was on the ferry,” he recalled. “It was 110 decibels in there or more. It was fun. And they asked if they could take more because they could tell that the protection was wearing off. I'd never heard that before.
“So I got on my bike, and I rode really fast because we didn't have enough on the ferry. We had handed most of them out. And so I got a whole bunch of them. I rode my bike down to the ferry. I waited for the ferry to dock. I gave them more. And then they started to text me and say, ‘We can tell it works.’ How amazing. And that was the beginning of our pathway to real-world data.”
To hear more about the research, the relationship between cognitive function and hearing, and if Seifer will be coming to a dance party near you, listen to the NutraCast.
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