Study NIH P50, in which the Director of the Advanced Center for Electrical and Electronic Engineering (AC3E), Dr. Matías Zañartu, participates will continue over the next five years, thanks to the renewal of funding over US$13 million, after its first stage successfully concluded.

The study receives input from research conducted at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and the Advanced Center for Electrical and Electronic Engineering (AC3E), Harvard Medical School, Boston University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So far, the study has led to the creation of the Vocal Hyperfunction Clinical Research Center and a comprehensive and multi-institutional research program at Harvard Medical School studying the causes of voice diseases, spawning three projects, one led by Dr. Zañartu.

The funding was awarded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the P50 program, one of the most competitive and largest medical research competitions in North America. With the funding, the team will continue to collect data on the voice and its relationship to diseases such as Parkinson’s and even schizophrenia, to help diagnose and treat them. The study began in 2017.

Research over the next five years will focus on the more clinical downstream of the research that has been developed.