Through our Innovation Seed Fund, we provide researchers with small grants (of up to £10,000) so they can investigate new ideas about the causes, treatment and diagnosis of hearing loss, tinnitus, and other hearing-related conditions.
This money helps researchers gain evidence, so they can go on to secure larger awards of funding in future.
To be awarded this funding, researchers must demonstrate how their ideas will ultimately bring benefit to the communities we support.
We have recently awarded four new grants through our Innovation Seed Fund, to:
Dr Brianna Atto, at the University of Tasmania in Australia. She’s exploring a new approach to preventing middle ear infections in children (and the associated hearing loss they cause). She says:
“Thanks to the generous support of RNID, we can take the next step in developing a new therapy to prevent ear infections and subsequent hearing loss in children.”
Developing a new technique to diagnose inherited hearing loss, Dr Suzanne de Bruijn at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands wants more people to be able to know the cause of their hearing loss and improve how we test new treatments. She says:
“I believe that the combined use of RNA- and DNA-sequencing could significantly improve the diagnosis of inherited hearing loss. The Innovation Seed Fund grant will allow me to explore this in more depth and perform the first experiments with a small group of people who have unexplained hearing loss. I am grateful for the opportunity that RNID has given to me.”
Dr Sriram Boothalingam at the National Acoustic Laboratories in Australia aims to improve the current newborn hearing screen techniques so that they can identify more babies that are deaf or have hearing loss when they’re born, and the cause of their hearing loss, so they can get the help they need as soon as possible. He says:
“The grant will support further development of a new test to detect and differentiate conductive, sensory, and neural hearing loss.”
Finally, Jack Martin at the UCL Ear Institute in London, UK, is researching a new approach to preventing the hearing loss that often occurs as a side effect of treatment with the anti-cancer drug cisplatin. He says:
“The Innovation Seed Fund grant will allow me to investigate the
response to cisplatin in the inner ear and test new treatments that I have identified in my research. It could ultimately lead to a way to prevent cisplatin-induced hearing loss.”
What research we fund
We are the only charity in the UK dedicated to funding hearing research. Read more below about our 3 areas of research and how you can support us.
We need your support
Hearing loss research is hugely underfunded. Only 83p is spent on research for each person with hearing loss, compared to £16 spent on research per person living with sight loss. Help us give hope for a better future today. Call our contact centre to donate to RNID today.