Carmen Unzu is group leader of the Gene Therapy for Hereditary Hearing Loss and AAV Engineering at CIMA – University of Navarra (Spain). She has more than 15 years of experience on the preclinical development of viral vectors for gene therapy, especially recombinant adeno-associated viral vectors (AAV), both in academia (CIMA-Spain, EPFL-Switzerland and Harvard Medical School-USA) and the biotech industry (Apic Bio, USA). Supported by competitive funding from the Spanish Government, national and international foundations and private donors, the laboratory research is focused on optimization of AAV vectors to efficiently deliver nucleic acids with minimal immunogenicity and nonclinical development of precision gene therapies for congenital hearing loss.