Fundación para la Investigación Médica Aplicada, Spain
Carmen Unzu is a group leader at CIMA-University of Navarra (Spain).
She has a hybrid academic-industry background with more than 15 years of experience in preclinical development of gene therapies for rare diseases.
More about Carmen’s work
After completing her PhD at the University of Navarra, she was a postdoctoral fellow at EPFL (Switzerland) with a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellowship. In 2017 she moved to the Mass Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School (USA) as a senior scientist. After that, Carmen joined Apic Bio (USA), a biotech that developed gene therapies.
Currently, her team works on developing precision gene medicines for hearing loss.
Investigating gene editing as a treatment for hearing loss
Read about Carmen’s research projectCarmen’s hopes for hearing research
Hearing is essential for human communication, which is the foundation of our social and emotional relationships. Hearing loss standard of care is conventional hearing aids or cochlear implants. However, these devices cannot mediate a full recovery of hearing sensitivity and have elevated maintenance costs.
With our research we aim to move a step forward on the durability, safety, and effectiveness of gene therapy to treat the most frequent form of genetic hearing loss.
I’m honoured to have received the RNID Innovation Seed Fund. It will allow us to fund the initial steps of a durable gene editing strategy for genetic hearing loss, which will be pivotal for advancing gene medicine for people who want it.