Auris Medical Announces Publication of New Data Highlighting the Role of Betahistine

Auris Medical (NASDAQ:EARS), a clinical-stage company dedicated to developing therapeutics that address important unmet medical needs in neurotology and central nervous system disorders, today highlighted the advance publication of an article demonstrating that betahistine promotes the retrieval of forgotten memories in mice and in healthy human volunteers.

As quoted in the press release:

The article was written by an independent Japanese research group and presents the outcomes of a study on the role of histamine in the recollection of forgotten memories and the effects of using histamine H₃ receptor inverse agonists for treatment. In the first part of the study, the authors demonstrated in mice that treatment with betahistine or thioperamide induced the recall of forgotten memories of certain objects one week or one month later. They showed that the memory recovery was promoted by the H₃ receptor inverse agonists through upregulation of histamine release in the brain, the following activation of histamine H₂ receptors and increased spontaneous activity in perirhinal cortex neurons.

In the second part of the study, 38 healthy adult volunteers were enrolled in a randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial. At baseline, they were shown 128 pictures of objects. Seven days after the training, they were shown again 32 of these objects, randomly mixed with 32 new objects and 32 objects that were similar, but not identical to previously shown images, and asked to decide whether each image was “old”, “new” or “similar”. Thirty minutes prior to the test, they received in a single dose either 108 mg betahistine mesilate, (i.e. three times the approved daily oral dose) or placebo. The test was repeated two days later, with different images, and with active-treated participants switching over to placebo and vice versa. Treatment with betahistine overall improved the percentage of correct memories (p<0.05), enhanced the retrieval of more difficult items and benefited participants with poor performance under placebo treatment (p<0.01).

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