Swansea University
Doctor Emma Kenyon is a Lecturer at Swansea University. Emma completed her PhD at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Her research uses anonymised data to understand how many people in the UK have taken ototoxic medications and whether these individuals have reported hearing loss, helping to build a clearer picture of the scale of drug‑induced hearing loss.
More about Emma’s work
Emma began her research career in 2013 when she joined Professor Guy Richardson’s lab at the University of Sussex, where she screened candidate molecules that could be used as therapeutics to protect inner ear hair cells from chemical damage.
During this project, she screened thousands of compounds for their ability to protect zebrafish lateral line hair cells – which are similar to the hair cells found in the mammalian inner ear – from the toxic effects of aminoglycoside antibiotics.
Her work in this area led to new ideas that formed the basis of an RNID‑funded Fellowship. This Fellowship enabled Emma to establish her own research group at Swansea University, where she continues to explore innovative approaches to preventing hearing loss.
Can anonymised patient records be used to assess the extent of hearing loss from prescription medication in the UK?
Read about Emma’s research projectEmma’s hopes for hearing research
Due to a family bereavement nearly 15 years ago, the difficulties people with hearing loss face on a daily basis and the lack of funding compared to other disabilities was brought into sharp relief. This was emphasised even more during the COVID pandemic.
If I can help even a little to prevent hearing loss, I think it’s a well spent career.
The use of certain types of therapeutic drugs that are used to treat serious illness can cause irreversible hearing loss, the incidence of which is not well documented.
While my main area of research is to identify ways of preventing drug-induced hearing loss, it’s important to understand the extent of the problem. This research aims to identify how many people in Wales (our sample population) have taken ototoxic (ear-toxic) medications and whether any of these people have reported hearing loss.
This project is the first step in identifying the extent to which ototoxic drugs contribute to preventable hearing loss, tinnitus and balance disorders in the UK.
RNID funding has made this pilot project possible and if successful our results can inform policy on how these drugs are prescribed and to provide data on other potential ototoxic drugs that can help to predict ototoxic side effects in drugs in development in the future.