A team of researchers led by Hinrich Staecker at the University of Kansas Medical Center will attempt to cure profound deafness by injecting deaf people with a harmless virus containing a gene that, if all goes according to plan, will trigger the regrowth of sensory receptors in their ears. Other technologies that treat deafness do so either by amplifying sounds (hearing aids) or translating the sounds into electrical waves that the brain interprets (cochlear implants).