The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine Department of Otolaryngology received a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund research related to biological treatments and clinical diagnosis of patients with hearing loss.
Xue Long Liu, M.D., Ph.D., FACS, professor of otolaryngology, human genetics, biochemistry, and pediatrics will serve as principal investigator. The grant will allow Liu to continue his research on human hearing loss, the most common sensory disorder affecting more than 28 million Americans.
Liu, who is the vice chair and Marian & Walter Hotchkiss Chair in Otolaryngology, is one of the top NIH-funded surgeon-scientists in the specialty. Having also received a $3 million dollar grant to research hearing loss in 2017, Liu is now the most successfully funded genetic hearing loss researcher in the United States.
With this new grant, Liu’s team will expand their comprehensive genomic and phenotypic deafness database for clinical care of deaf individuals, identify and characterize novel genes for hearing loss using state-of-the-art genomic tools, assess impacts of genomic testing on patients, and conduct preclinical studies of gene and cell based therapy approach of CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing to treat hearing loss.
