Researchers find target to protect hearing during chemotherapy treatment. Scientists have found a new way to explain the hearing loss caused by cisplatin, a powerful drug used to treat many forms of cancer. Using a highly sensitive technique to measure and map cisplatin in mouse and human inner ear tissues, researchers found that forms of cisplatin build up in the inner ear. They also found a region in the inner ear that could be targeted for efforts to prevent hearing loss from cisplatin. The study is published in Nature Communications(link is external), and was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communications Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health.