Official inauguration of the Hearing Institute on February 27, 2020

In September 2019, an inaugural international scientific conference was held to celebrate the creation of the Hearing Institute. The institute is now gearing up for its official external inauguration, which will take place on Thursday February 27.

The event will be held in rue de Charenton, in Paris' 12th arrondissement, and will be attended by a number of leading political figures, including several members of the French government – Edouard Philippe, Prime Minister, and Frédérique Vidal, Minister for Higher Education, Research and Innovation. The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and the President of the Greater Paris Region, Valérie Pécresse, will also be at the event. These prestigious guests will be welcomed by Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, President of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller, Jean-Pierre Meyers, President of the Fondation Pour l'Audition, Gilles Bloch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Inserm, Stewart Cole, President of the Institut Pasteur, Christian Vigouroux, Chairman of the Institut Pasteur Board of Directors, François Romaneix, Senior Executive Vice-President Administration and Finance at the Institut Pasteur, and Christine Petit, Director of the Hearing Institute. The invitation-only event will open with a press conference featuring a presentation of the project and an outline of the prospects offered by the Hearing Institute for basic and translational research in auditory neuroscience. The guests of honor will then be given a tour of the three buildings in the 4,000m2 facility. Following the official opening, the guests will take their seats in the auditorium for a series of official addresses concluded by the Prime Minister.

Hearing is a major public health challenge: some 500 million people worldwide currently live with hearing loss (including 6 million in France), and that figure is expected to rise to 900 million by 2050. The Hearing Institute is committed to becoming a key player in the field by developing innovative diagnostic methods and preventive and curative treatments for hearing loss.

The inauguration marks the final official milestone before the future teams move to the new site and the Institut Pasteur center becomes operational. The Hearing Institute will pursue three main priorities:

• Carrying out basic research

• Developing translational approaches

• Transferring scientific knowledge

The Hearing Institute was set up in June 2019 at the initiative of the Fondation Pour l'Audition and the Institut Pasteur. It is a center for basic and translational research in neuroscience, dedicated to hearing.
The Hearing Institute is a joint Institut Pasteur-Inserm research unit. It is composed of scientific staff from the Institut Pasteur, Inserm and the CNRS.

It includes a Center for Research and Innovation in Human Audiology (CERIAH), which develops innovative diagnostic methods and works in collaboration with the ENT departments in hospitals in the AP-HP Paris Public Hospital Network (especially Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital) and university hospitals elsewhere in France (including Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand and Bordeaux), and with other hearing health professionals, especially hearing aid specialists.

An internal inauguration and an inaugural event for patient associations will be held at a later date once the teams have moved to their new premises.