I just shared that link with the sister of a New York musician who committed suicide 2 years ago.
She has just recently organised another fundraiser for ATA in his memory.
They have no shame in taking money raised on someone's tragedy but fail to even mention a tinnitus suicide as remotely possible.
This is the message she received after I told her few facts about ATA and their sincerity to find cure:
Hi Val, we had contacted the ATA regarding questions related to where their money is going as far as research purposes and received the following answer:
"ATA has a long and rich history of of funding only the best research proposals that we receive. We have a Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) comprised of researchers from all over the world who are experts in the field who conduct the peer review of the proposals that we receive at ATA and score and recommend for funding only the best research that will fall into one or more paths on our Roadmap to a Cure. The Roadmap was first developed by our SAC in 2005 and updated last year to include a new path (now five paths of research instead of four) to coincide what has been learned over the past decade in tinnitus research. I work directly with the Scientific Advisory Committee and our Chair, Dr. Michael Hoffer, an otolaryngologist at the Univiersity Of Miami who spent the majority of his career working for the military as an otolaryngologist at San Diego Naval Medical Center. He is published in hundreds of papers working on tinnitus with researchers from all over the world. Our research process is as follows:
1. At the deadline the reviews are assembled at ATA headquarters and logged into the ATA grant application database.
2. The SAC Chair selected three reviewers for each review and they were contacted to verify they were willing to conduct the proposed reviews.
3. Information was provided to each Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) member about the key investigators and the subjects of all the grants and each SAC member had to notify the ATA and the SAC Chair about any conflicts of interest. All reviewers signed the conflict of interest before they were given the applications. Any SAC member who had a conflict of interest (COI) was not given access to any of the COI-related grants or participated in the discussion and scoring of the COI-related application(s).
4. The designated reviewers for each application was sent the full application along with a review template to fill out. All grants had three reviewers and all reviewers responded on time to their assigned reviews.
5. The scores from the reviewers were averaged and all the applications were listed in rank order from highest average score to lowest. Any proposal receiving a score of 70 or greater, were designated for discussion at a telephonic SAC meeting to review grants.
6. The review discussion was led by the SAC Chair and the three reviewers discussed the application and answered questions from all the SAC members. In addition, patient reviewers also provided comments this year to provide information about potential patient impact of the proposal which were read aloud by the SAC Chair during the meeting after the peer review discussion took place. After the discussion was complete for a particular application the SAC members were requested to note their score for the application on a special scoring form.
7. The SAC members submitted their scores for all discussed applications and those were then averaged to rank order them for presentation to the ATA Board of Directors who made the final funding decisions.
We also implemented a patient review during this year's process where a panel of patient reviewers also scored and commented on the proposals so that we could include the possible patient-impact the proposals would have and that was factored into the final decision-making by the Board of Directors.
We have a restricted account where the funds you raised went directly into. They are separate from our operational funds. If you look on our website at ATA.org you will see that our Board of Directors funded two research proposals this year (at the April 2018 Board of Directors meeting) awarded to Gabriel Corfas, Ph.D., and Sylvie Hebert, Ph.D., both in the second year of their grants which showed extreme promise in the first year in the amount of $50,000 and $49,665 respectively. Your $6,000 was part of that.
You can see those grants here:
https://www.ata.org/research-toward-cure/research-program/current-ata-research
In addition, you can see all the research we have funded in the past here:
https://www.ata.org/research-toward-cure/research-program/past-ata-funded-research
We publish the results of those studies in our membership magazine, Tinnitus Today. It is part of the agreement that our grant recipients sign when accepting the funds from our organization. If they do not use the entirety of the grant money they return it to us.
The grant awards for the new grants we funded just went out in June. We conduct a yearly audit which we are in the middle of for this past year and in 13 years there has never been a discrepancy in where we are allocating funds based on how they were raised.
I hope that this satisfies your concerns about our research grant process and how we conduct it. It is intensive and transparent and models the National Institutes of Health process."
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