If Beethoven, who died in the early 1800s, had gone deaf today, his experience would have been very different.

That is thanks to the cochlear implant. Developed in the 1960s, it is the first ever bionic device created to restore a sensory organ and has now been fitted in over a million people.

Although not perfect, almost every recipient will eventually understand speech, even in modest background noise.

Yet, beside incremental improvements to the implant’s algorithms and coding systems over 40 years of operation, the underlying technology has largely remained unchanged, even though the number of research publications on the topic have tripled per decade in the last 30 years.

This could soon change. New research is seeking to combine gene therapy with improvements in the mechanical engineering of the cochlear implant to improve hearing outcomes for patients.

This endeavour is ever more important, given it’s expected that one in every 10 people will have...