I joined the Bionics Institute in April 2021 and I continue every day to be impressed by the calibre of our researchers, scientists and engineers. I love the way that we bring together innovative new ideas with clinical needs, doing truly translational research to bring products to market.

We would like to acknowledge the support of all our donors this year; your help really does help us to make a difference. Your support is vital to help us develop new treatments and diagnostic tools that change the lives of people with a range of conditions, including hearing impairment, Parkinson’s disease, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis and type 2 diabetes.

I am so grateful to those members of our donor community who have been loyal to us for over twenty years. We really appreciate your long-standing fidelity and we are looking forward, in early February 2022, to recognising your support in a more formal way. I hope that I will get the chance to meet more of you in person later this year and certainly in 2022. We would like you to come to our planned Meet the Researcher events and learn from the team about how, together, we can help transform lives.

Thank You To Our Donors

We have been privileged to receive some wonderful gifts this year, which have allowed us to accelerate our work in developing innovative devices, diagnostics and therapies to help transform people’s lives.

Your generosity has quick impact; some of our current research is likely to be used in clinics within the next three to five years, so you can see the effects of your donations in the short-term.

Your generous donations to our Christmas appeal for tinnitus are helping us move faster to trial stage. We continue to receive news from people with this debilitating condition, who are anxious to see an objective diagnostic test become available in clinics.

We were delighted to host a launch event in May for Neo-Bionica, our medical device prototype manufacturing facility, a joint venture with the University of Melbourne. We look forward to talking to more of you about this exciting new venture, which means that devices developed in Australia can also be prototyped for clinical trials in Melbourne, rather than overseas. We thank the Ian Potter Foundation for the seed funding that meant we could start this important work in 2021.

We are most grateful to all of you who donated to our annual tax appeal in June, to help babies with hearing loss have the best start in life and not fall behind at school, through access to our innovative EarGenie test. Your support will allow us to fast track our technology and get to clinical trial stage earlier.

The generous gift from the estate of the late Dr Brian Entwisle has allowed us to continue to track patients involved in the Bionic Eye clinical trial, work which could herald improvements in future devices, as well as support to our hearing loss research.

Thanks to an anonymous donation, matched by funding from the Lions Clubs of Victoria and the Entwisle estate, we were able to recruit Associate Professor Gérard Loquet to work in our hearing loss research.

Generous donations from Di and Neville Bertalli in support of Associate Professor James Fallon over the last three years have resulted in some very interesting breakthroughs in adapting technology into other diseases such as arthritis, type 2 diabetes and incontinence.

Thank you for your support. All gifts count, large or small, whether lifetime gifts or gifts in Wills. Thank you for being part of the Bionics Institute community. We will keep you up to date with developments; it is looking to be a major year for innovation at the Bionics Institute.