Ricardo Ferreira Bento1. 1. Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, SP, Brazil. Electronic address: rbento@gmail.com.
Dear Editor,I would like to congratulate BJORL for the excellent editorial published in issue 81, number 2, by Prof. Dr. Pedro Mangabeira Albernaz on the history of cochlear implants in Brazil.Professor Pedro Mangabeira was the pioneer in this technique in our country, having been honored at the last Ibero-American Congress of Cochlear Implants.It so happens that in the Editorial, I do not know whether due to lack of space, something of extreme historical importance was omitted: the initiative, in 1990, to manufacture in Brazil the first national cochlear implant, developed entirely in the Bioengineering Department of Instituto do Coração (the Heart Institute) of HCFMUSP, with the cooperation of the FMUSP Otorhinolaryngology Discipline, which won an award at the time from the Inter-American Development Bank as the best scientific project of 1989. The first work about it was published in this respected journal, the Brazilian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology.Two patents were generated based on these works and several patients were successfully implanted (Patent INPI no. 910.5546-6; on 12/16/1991).The researchers involved in this project were Ricardo Ferreira Bento, Aroldo Miniti, Adolpho Leiner, Carlos Alberto Nunes, Milton Oshiro, Maria Valéria Goffi Gomes.Only five countries have developed cochlear implant devices, including Brazil with this device. The latter is cited in more than 1000 publications on CI around the world as a pioneer in its concepts.