Professor Corné Kros
Medical Advisory Board
Biography
Corné Kros MD PhD is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Sussex.
Professor Kros qualified as a medical doctor at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. He went on to do a PhD in physiology at Cambridge, studying the physiology of inner hair cells, the sensory receptor cells in the cochlea that signal the reception of sound to the brain. In his research he continued to focus on cochlear hair cell physiology, in particular the properties of spontaneous activity in pre-hearing inner hair cells and the process of mechano-electrical transduction by which these cells detect sound.
His current interests, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Action on Hearing Loss, lie in the detrimental side effects of aminoglycoside antibiotics and the antineoplastic drug cisplatin on hearing, and the development of blocking agents that might prevent hair-cell damage due to treatment with these drugs.
The prospect of gradually developing hearing loss adds to the difficulties experienced by boys born blind due to Norrie disease, as well as by their family members and carers.
As an honorary member of the Medical Advisory Board for the Norrie Disease Foundation, Professor Kros aims to apply his insights into the physiology of the inner ear to help find approaches to understand and treat the consequences for hearing of mutations in the gene encoding the Norrin protein.