Prize money to help inner ear research
AN Otago biomedical scientist says she was ‘‘thrilled’’ to receive $25,000 through a national symposium to find a better way of delivering medicine to patients with hearing problems caused by acute injuries or chronic conditions.
University of Otago research fellow Dr Jaydee Cabral’s team of researchers — made up of Brain Research New Zealand and MedTech CoRE academics — won the Brain and Technology Symposium 2018 Challenge earlier this month.
They would be working on a better way of delivering drugs to the inner ear. Dr Cabral was coleading the team for MedTech CoRE, while another researcher leads the Brain Research side of the project.
‘‘This would be used to treat anybody that had either acute cochlear injury, or chronic disorders,’’ Dr Cabral said.
An example would be agerelated hearing loss.
She was ‘‘really, really excited’’ by the recognition the team had received, and said the work would take place between September and next March.
The researchers would be looking at ways to increase permeability of membranes, so drugs could be delivered more effectively.
This was the second year the symposium had been held.
Dr Cabral said the symposium had been a good experience, giving Otago researchers the chance to meet people working in different disciplines from a variety of universities.
She said she would be juggling research into drug delivery with teaching graduate students.
In 2017 she was given a twoyear $150,000 Health Research Council grant to work on the treatment of nonhealing or chronic wounds, using 3D bioprinted vascularised regenerative tissues.
Dr Cabral said she was finishing up her first year of the work, which she described as tissue engineering. It involved harvesting cells from the patient, growing them and then putting them into a living dressing, she said.