Sound Pharmaceuticals, a privately held biopharmaceutical company with a focus on developing drugs for hearing loss and brain injury, has appointed Bruce A. Beutler as a scientific advisor.

Beutler is a recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries involving the activation of innate immunity. He is currently the director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In addition, he has identified and characterized COMT2, a genetic mutation that leads to human deafness.