I can give you my quick one-off summary:
In 2014, more late stage clinical trials for tinnitus treatments were either in operation or being prepared to start than ever before. There are clinical trials for multiple modes of treatment, from vagus nerve stimulation, to intratympanic injection of esketamine for acute onset tinnitus, to development of AUT00063, a potassium channel modulator, which would treat even chronic tinnitus.
GenVec has started the first ever hair-cell restoration and hearing restoration trial ever. I can't understate how huge that is.
Published papers in the field of tinnitus have nearly tripled from 10 years ago.
There are several companies investigating methods of treating acute hearing loss, menieries disease and otoprotection.
The annual TRI conferences continue to attract more people and better talent from multiple different academic fields.
Data collection, known as the TINNET, began this year. This will help to seriously categorize the different etiologies of tinnitus. A lot of the failures of previous investigations and trials can be blamed on poor definition of tinnitus sub-groups and what the target treatment audience is.
On this very site here, have started our own "mini-trial", pulling a Barry Marshall, (a microbiology pathologist who famously drank infected broth to prove to the scientific community that ulcers were often caused by bacteria and not "stress" because he lacked people he could ethically experiment on) people have began taking trobalt off label prescribed by various medical people because of the anecdotal and academic evidence that trobalt may possibly treat tinnitus. We have seen a good degree of success with many of the people who have taken part in this courageous experiment.
In fact, we're currently in contact with researchers about setting up an actual study to investigate the potential for trobalt to treat tinnitus patients.
So, if you are afraid that 2014 has been a slow year, you'll be quite surprised to find the opposite. Hold on to your pants, because 2015 will be cool with preliminary efficacy data from Autifony being released this summer.