“What cochlear implants can do today seems like a miracle to many people. But this is actually the result of hard, painstaking, and collaborative work by teams of experts over the course of many years.”

Dr. Ingeborg Hochmair, founder and CEO of MED-EL, emphasizes the importance of translational research. Together with her husband Erwin, it was her vision in the 1970s already, to overcome hearing loss as a barrier to communication with cochlear implants.

The fact that this vision became reality and cochlear implants became a huge success, is also based on intense translational collaboration between fundamental research, medicine, clinicians, patiens and MED-EL.  While cochlear implantation was considered an experiment 30 years ago, it is today regarded as the gold standard, a routine treatment for severe to profound hearing loss.

Broader indications, new treatment and surgical methods, regular technological product innovations that brought about a better quality of life for people with hearing loss, are the result of cooperations between around 200 external scientific cooperation partners in the past 30 years.

The publication “„Thirty Years of Translational Research Behind MED-EL“, published in March 2021, honors the countless results of these long-standing global partnerships. Topics such as bilateral cochlear implantation, EAS, single-sided deafness or special electrodes for cochlear anomalies, are topics of scientific discourses, from the first idea to market entry.

The compendium, published as a supplement to Acta Oto-Laryngolocica, serves future scientists as an inspiration for their research work. Free download on https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ioto20/141/sup1?nav=tocList