There was an article on Bloomberg today on new research into restoring hearing. Here's the link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-08/lady-gaga-at-high-volume-drives-hearing-loss-drug-search-health.html
Why would it not work on MM patients? The research seeks to regenerate hair cells, regardless of the cause by which they were damaged.
Perhaps because the disease that destroyed them in the first place is ongoing and would interfere with the healing process?
Speculating ... For those in whom the origin of mm is viral, perhaps if the virus is 'killed', then it would work.
Serious research is being done, at least at Novartis and the University of Washington. Mammals do not regenerate hair cells, yet researchers have recently managed to do it in rats and mice. That is a breakthrough, assuming that the techniques could be applied to humans. The market for regenerating hair cells is huge and the economic rewards for developing a process are as well. In the USA alone, there are 30 million people with hearing loss, mostly from damaged hair cells. That's a multi-billion dollar market. Research money follows financial opportunity, so you can be sure that if this can happen, it will because of potential profits. If a process for restoring hair cells were developed, it might be that MM patients would benefit --- perhaps by periodically repeating the restoration procedure, even if the disease slowly killed the restored hair cells between procedures. I sure would give it a try.