Hearing loss and balance disorders affect millions, yet scientists know surprisingly little about the inner ear, the tiny, hidden organs responsible for both. “Hearing is an incredibly complicated process,” said Carl Kesselman, William M. Keck Professor of Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “The anatomy is complex and the data is sparse.”

Because the inner ear is buried deep within the skull, it’s nearly impossible to study in living people. For decades, scientists have had to rely on rare donations after death. Now, a collaboration between USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC,  and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) is taking on that challenge by creating EarBase, a national database of the organs of hearing and balance.

Building a National Resource

The effort combines three key elements: a donor registry that encourages and coordinates the donation of temporal bones, the bones that house the delicate organs responsible for hearing and balance; a national network of specialized labs to process and study the tissue; and a central database that stores and shares the data. The database will be the repository for data generated by the laboratories past, present, and future, and a hub for data sharing and analysis. By bringing these pieces together, the project ensures that each rare donation benefits the entire field rather than a single lab.

From FaceBase to Hearing

For Kesselman and his collaborators at USC, including researchers at the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC, the challenge is familiar. More than a decade ago, with support from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), they launched FaceBase to advance data sharing in craniofacial and dental research. The effort was co-led by Yang Chai, Dean of the Ostrow School of Dentistry, and Kesselman, reflecting a long-standing collaboration between clinical and data science research at USC. 

Since then, FaceBase has grown into a global resource that supports thousands of scientists and has fueled discoveries in conditions like cleft palate and craniosynostosis. Its success has shown how a well-designed data platform can accelerate an entire field of medicine. “Everything in your head is connected: ears, eyes, face, brain,” Kesselman said. “With FaceBase, we showed how you can take data from many different sources, make it accessible, and create new opportunities for discovery.”

Now they are doing the same thing for hearing and balance. “We are building an ever growing and dynamic data resource that will make a significant impact in improving human health,” said Chai.

Data Drives Discovery

Kesselman points to another major health project he was involved with, the Protein Data Bank (PDB), as proof of what’s possible. The PDB is an open archive of molecular structures that has transformed biology by making decades of data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). At ISI, his team helped expand the Protein Data Bank through PDB-Dev, a next-generation repository powered by Deriva, the data management software they created. “It’s why AI can now predict protein structures,” Kesselman said. “Without that data, none of those breakthroughs would have been possible.”

EarBase is built on the same principles. Instead of scattered, siloed records, it will give scientists a shared resource to spot patterns, compare results across labs, and train the next generation of researchers. “We’re training researchers, running tutorials, and making sure people have the skills to use these resources,” Kesselman said. “This is really about impact. We want to build resources that enable discoveries that will change people’s lives.”

Published on June 10th, 2026

Last updated on June 10th, 2026