Category: Medicine

Wolfe Center for Translational Medicine and Engineering will bring doctors, scientists and engineers together at Rambam to turn research into treatments faster, with work spanning AI, biochips, drug delivery, medical devices and regenerative medicine

The Technion and Rambam Health Care Campus have signed an agreement to establish a joint center aimed at accelerating the development of medical treatments and technologies by bringing physicians, scientists and engineers together under one roof.

The Andrea and Lawrence Wolfe Center for Translational Medicine and Engineering will be established in the Helmsley Health Discovery Tower at Rambam and will occupy two floors, the institutions said.

The center, funded through a donation from Andrea and Larry Wolfe, will include research laboratories focused on artificial intelligence in medicine, biochips, drug delivery and molecular therapies, medical devices, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and health care systems.

The goal is to shorten the path between scientific and engineering research and clinical use, allowing problems identified at the patient’s bedside to become research projects and new discoveries to be translated more quickly into treatments.

Technion President Professor Uri Sivan and Rambam Director General Dr. Michal Mekel signed the agreement.

“The joint agreement we are signing today is a natural continuation of the vision of the founders of the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, who understood the power of combining medicine, science, engineering and technology for the benefit of humanity,” Sivan said.

“The combination of a research hospital and a technological university provides the entire value chain, from the patient’s bedside to the research and development laboratories and back to the patient’s bedside.”

Sivan also thanked Andrea and Larry Wolfe for supporting the project, describing them as longtime partners of both institutions.

“This is a wonderful example of the power of philanthropy to drive major initiatives that would not otherwise get underway,” he said. “Andrea and Larry have not only contributed generously but have embraced the vision at the heart of this collaboration — the aspiration to solve major problems facing humanity by combining science, medicine and engineering.”

Mekel said the center reflects the growing importance of cooperation between medicine and engineering. She cited Kurt Semm, regarded as a pioneer of modern laparoscopy, whose work combined medical expertise with engineering ingenuity.

“Today, as researchers and physicians, it is clear to us that medicine cannot exist and advance without research — not only research in the life sciences, but also in engineering,” Mekel said. “Breakthroughs emerge when different worlds meet, and in our case, when medicine meets engineering.”

She also credited former Rambam director general Professor Rafi Beyar with advancing the vision for such a center nearly two decades ago.

Professor Noam Ziv, deputy senior executive vice president for engineering, life sciences and medicine at the Technion, said the center was being established amid a steady increase in joint projects involving Technion and Rambam researchers.

He pointed to a recent competition for a joint research grant on artificial intelligence in the “hospital of the future,” won by a team that included researchers in architecture and data sciences alongside senior Rambam medical and administrative staff. The breadth of that team, he said, demonstrated the potential scope of collaboration between the institutions.

Prof. Lior Gepstein, director of Rambam’s Research Division and a faculty member at the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, said the center was intended to overcome traditional disciplinary boundaries.

“The complex challenges of medicine do not stop at the boundaries of a single discipline,” Gepstein said. “To find new solutions, we must bring together medical teams with firsthand knowledge of patients’ needs, scientists who investigate the mechanisms of life and engineers who know how to transform an idea into a practical solution.”

Gepstein said the center’s location inside Rambam was intended to facilitate a direct link between clinical needs and research.

“The agreement we are signing today is not the finish line, but the starting point,” he said. “The center’s success will be measured not only by the number of studies, papers or patents it produces, but by our ability to build a shared community, transform medical needs into practical solutions and bring those solutions to patients.”

Senior officials from both the Technion and Rambam attended the signing ceremony, including administrators, researchers, medical leaders and representatives responsible for academic affairs, research, operations, finance and external relations.

Cutting-edge computational tools are helping Israeli doctors and scientists detect cancers earlier, understand them better and treat them more effectively

From his fourth-floor lab at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Professor Ron Kimmel can see Haifa Bay, the green slopes of Mount Carmel and the distant hills of Galilee. But it’s the view of microscopic breast cancer cells on his computer screen that really excites him.

Kimmel is an expert in computer vision, machine learning, medical imaging and scientific computation. He believes artificial intelligence can dramatically improve the accuracy and efficiency of identifying cancer subtypes — which, crucially, can help oncologists tailor treatments to individual patients.

“We’re not trying to diagnose if a patient has cancer; these are already confirmed cases of invasive breast cancer,” Kimmel said. “But one of the challenges is deciding exactly which patient will benefit from which treatment. You don’t want to overtreat or undertreat.”

Kimmel said that AI — which can analyze large amounts of data from clinical trials — is often more accurate than human observations, making it particularly useful in determining how to treat breast cancer.

AI is also the focus of Dr. Debbie Anaby, founder of the Breast Cancer Imaging Lab (BreaCIL) at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Her aim is to minimize patient anxiety and slash the number of unnecessary biopsies by using AI-driven computational approaches for analyzing scans.

“MRI is the most sensitive imaging tool available to detect breast cancer — especially for women at high risk like carriers of the BRCA mutation or those with a family history. But that high sensitivity also finds many lesions that appear suspicious, but ultimately turn out to be benign,” Anaby said. “The goal of my research is to develop AI-based tools to help radiologists distinguish more accurately between cancer and findings that are harmless.”

Also at Sheba is Dr. Talia Golan, who leads the institution’s Pancreatic Cancer Program and the Pancreatic Translational Research Lab. Among the most lethal of all cancers, pancreatic cancer is particularly difficult to treat. And like breast cancer, pancreatic cancer is more common among Ashkenazi Jews due to the increased presence of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations.

According to research, about 1 in 40 Ashkenazi Jews carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation, which is 10 to 20 times higher than in the general population. While having a mutated or defective copy of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene can lead to pancreatic cancer, the risk is 2-6 times higher than those who don’t have such mutations.

Golan said the last year or two has seen “leaps and bounds in the field of AI-guided research” when it comes to pancreatic cancer.

“Science’s ability to integrate the full spectrum of research data — including clinical data and all the other data points surrounding a patient — and analyze it in an unfiltered way is limited,” Golan said. “However, we can capture and integrate these data and use AI to predict which treatment trajectory is most likely to benefit each patient, based on analysis of very large cohorts.”

Of course, despite all its promises, Golan cautions that AI can also be a double-edged sword.

“You need to learn to use AI, but it’s like a monster,” she said. “You’ve got to be careful because AI can predict things that are inaccurate. You need to have enough deep knowledge to identify inaccuracies, and you need to know what prompts you’re putting in to guide the AI.”

What Kimmel, Anaby and Golan have in common isn’t just that all three are using AI to transform cancer research, treatment and diagnosis. All three have also been awarded grants from the Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), an international nonprofit based in New York that invests in Israeli scientists leading global cancer research breakthroughs.

Alan Herman, ICRF’s executive director, said BRCA-mutant cancers — particularly breast and pancreatic cancer — remain among the most urgent challenges in oncology, and that AI is opening doors that traditional research methods simply couldn’t reach before.

“These three projects reflect exactly what ICRF was built to support: bold science that will translate into real clinical impact for patients,” said Herman, himself a cancer survivor. “We’re proud to fund researchers who are using cutting-edge computational tools to find these cancers earlier, understand them more precisely and ultimately treat them more effectively.”

Kimmel, who founded and leads the Technion’s Geometric Image Processing Lab, is receiving $180,000 in ICRF funding over a three-year period. That grant is going toward an AI model Kimmel is working on that is trained to analyze routine pathology samples to predict whether a breast cancer patient is likely to benefit from chemotherapy.

“Traditionally, doctors examine a few slices of a tumor using basic staining, and then perform more detailed tests on selected areas to understand its type and characteristics,” Kimmel said. “Our AI-based method looks at all of these basic slides across the tumor, so it can capture features that may be missed in a few selected samples. We showed that this broader view can also help determine the best course of treatment.”

Such a system requires only a digital scanner and internet access, making advanced analysis of biopsy samples possible in any clinic — even in areas with limited medical resources. This technology “should eventually lead to enhanced pathological methods and better prognostic tools for oncologists, and should ultimately improve the quality of life for patients worldwide,” according to ICRF.

Anaby — winner of an ICRF Career Development Award worth $135,000 over three years — is working to combine advanced image processing, quantitative image analysis and AI to extract from breast MRIs information that clinicians don’t routinely use.

For example, Anaby said AI can detect extremely small lesions the human eye may miss; it can also help distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous breast tumors.

“Rather than treating breast MRI simply as a collection of images, we transform it into objective quantitative measurements that capture subtle imaging patterns within breast tissue,” said Anaby, who works closely with Professor Miri Sklair-Levy, who is head of breast radiology at Sheba Medical Center. “We then investigate whether these measurements reveal imaging signatures of cancer, and whether machine learning can use them to better distinguish malignant tumors from benign lesions and normal breast tissue.”

At Sheba, women at high risk of breast cancer get MRI screenings once a year throughout their lives, from age 25 or 30 until their early 70s. Between 60% and 70% of those MRIs result in false positives, according to Anaby.

“These women usually get more biopsies because doctors don’t want to take any chances,” Anaby said. “It’s a very anxious time for these women.”

Anaby said support from the Israel Cancer Research Fund allowed her team to take the first step. “Thanks to ICRF, we were able to develop these models using data from Israeli patients,” she said. “Next, we want to see whether these imaging patterns hold true for women of different backgrounds, so the knowledge we gain can help as many people as possible.”

Anaby added that the ICRF grant “will allow us to develop a new idea in-house, get some first results and then go on from there to a wider set of populations — for Black, Hispanic and Asian women too, not just the Israeli population which includes a high percentage of Ashkenazi Jews with BRCA mutations,” she said. “That means a real mix of data.”

Golan, who was born and raised in South Africa, has been at Sheba since 2004, where she treats pancreatic cancer, with a special interest in patients with inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. Such patients, she said, generally respond well to platinum-based chemotherapy and PARP inhibitors, a type of targeted cancer drug.

Between 900 and 1,000 patients are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer annually in Israel; about 380 of them receive treatment at Golan’s clinic. Globally, around 5% of people with the disease have BRCA mutations, though in Israel the prevalence is higher.

“There are new drugs that have recently received FDA approval, but it’s still a very aggressive cancer, and the five-year survival rate is quite low,” she said, adding that besides genetic factors, pancreatic cancer is on the rise due to preventable causes such as obesity and smoking.

Golan’s five-year, $500,000 grant will fund the testing of new biological agents in pre-clinical settings using patient-derived models that mimic the patients’ clinical  journey.

“By utilizing these preclinical model systems, we investigate mechanisms of resistance to biological treatment, and try to discover novel treatment combinations to improve the outcome for this unique subset of patients,” she said. “AI will help us identify specific subtypes of patients who can benefit from precision treatment. Some can really benefit from intensive treatment, while for others, the best you can do for them is offer good palliative care.”

For researchers embracing AI, the potential is huge, despite the risks. “It’s really a fascinating time,” Golan said. “I myself am still learning this.”

The hospital-developed system analyses medical histories, laboratory results and imaging needs in real time, cutting admission delays and flagging hidden emergencies including a severe infection, suspected child abuse and a life-threatening potassium deficiency.

A new artificial intelligence system operating at Rambam Health Care Campus analyses the data of every patient in its emergency departments in real time, suggests possible diagnoses and treatments and identifies complex or unusual cases within seconds.

The system, named Shaked, has been in use at the Haifa hospital for the past six months. According to its developers, it has already shortened the time required to admit patients by one hour and reduced waiting time for specialist consultations in the adult and paediatric emergency departments by 25 minutes.

“This is the first AI system involved at highly important decision-making points in the emergency department,” said Prof. Shahar Shelly, director of Rambam’s Neurology Department and head of the artificial intelligence laboratory at the Technion’s medical faculty, who initiated and developed the system.

“We believe waiting times will be shortened significantly in the near future. The results have already amazed us.”

Artificial intelligence has assumed a growing role in health care in recent years. Hospitals and health funds are developing and adopting systems that analyze medical information, support clinical decisions and assist physicians in treating patients.

At the same time, the health system remains concerned about doctors independently using external AI products such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, which may not operate within secure medical databases or under institutional oversight.

Shaked supports medical teams throughout the emergency-room process, from admission, diagnosis and treatment to the decision to hospitalize or discharge a patient.

The system consolidates each patient’s medical history, compares it with similar cases, receives and analyzes laboratory results and prioritizes imaging examinations such as CT scans in real time for all patients currently in the emergency department.

“The system sends alerts to doctors’ computers about specific patients whose condition could deteriorate within a short period, even when their clinical indicators appeared reasonable during triage,” Shelly said.

It was gum inflammation, not a stroke

Shelly described a recent case in which the system identified severe gum inflammation in a patient whose symptoms initially appeared consistent with a stroke.

“A young woman arrived with neurological symptoms characteristic of a stroke, including paralysis on one side of her face that had developed very rapidly,” he said.

“Because of the suspected stroke, we were preparing to activate the stroke protocol, including an urgent CT scan. Although neither the patient nor the doctor made the connection, the system alerted us that two weeks earlier she had undergone a complex dental procedure that could become complicated, create a localised infection in the jaw and place pressure on the facial nerve.”

An oral and maxillofacial specialist was summoned to the emergency department and determined that the woman was suffering from acute gum inflammation rather than a stroke.

Another particularly sensitive case occurred in Rambam’s pediatric emergency department after a 4-month-old girl arrived with a fractured thigh.

“The parents suggested that their 3-year-old child may have fallen on her, but the system retrieved an emergency-room visit from a month earlier involving another injury,” said Dr. Idit Pasternak, director of the pediatric emergency department at Rambam’s Ruth Rappaport Children’s Hospital.

“Analyzing the case and combining the current fracture with the previous injury immediately raised suspicion of child abuse. Without the artificial intelligence, there would certainly have been a consultation with a specialist and a discussion involving the entire team, but in this case the Shaked system raised a red flag over an injury characteristic of abuse.”

Because doctors believed the infant’s life could be at risk, they reported the case to the appropriate authorities without further delay.

A third case involved a 13-year-old boy who complained of muscle pain. According to Pasternak, the system analyzed his blood tests and alerted doctors to the possibility of severe hypokalemia combined with metabolic acidosis, a rare and life-threatening condition caused by an acute potassium deficiency.

“Without immediate treatment, acute heart and respiratory failure can develop within a short time, leading to cardiac arrest and death,” she said. “The system saved valuable time. The doctors immediately confirmed the diagnosis and began lifesaving treatment.”

‘ER lines will become a thing of the past’

Shelly said one of the principal causes of extended emergency-room stays is the wait for medical imaging, which can sometimes last several hours and create a risk of its own.

The system evaluates the patient’s symptoms, medical background, current clinical indicators and laboratory findings, compares them with existing medical literature and then recommends whether imaging is necessary and which cases should receive the highest priority.

Physicians review every recommendation and retain responsibility for the final decision.

“The system identifies specific red flags for conditions such as internal bleeding, stroke, pulmonary embolism and others,” Shelly said. “Such a case will be placed at the top of the list and marked as urgent and requiring immediate action.”

In the near future, the system is also expected to help prepare summaries of findings based on radiological interpretations.

Another tool incorporated into Shaked is a chat interface. Instead of opening dozens of previous patient visits to search for a specific piece of information, a physician can question the system about the patient’s file and medical history.

The tool operates using databases developed over decades within the hospital.

“Our AI does not have to go outside the system to mine information, but relies on the most up-to-date medical databases,” Shelly said. “This makes the teams’ work more efficient in terms of both time and precision.”

“Since we began operating the AI as a quiet adviser in the background, we have spared patients unnecessary CT scans and identified patients who need hospitalization more quickly,” he added.

“The system can refresh medical information in real time and changes with every result that arrives. That level of dynamism is the first of its kind.”

The system was developed with the support of Rambam’s management and through collaboration involving Pasternak, Emergency Department Director Dr. Alexander Strizhevsky, nursing teams and the hospital’s Digital and Information Technologies Division, headed by Hagar Trau, together with hospital developers Adi Ahituv and Keren Miron.

Dr. Michal Mekel, director of Rambam, said the hospital had placed innovation, and particularly the development of artificial intelligence, high on its list of priorities.

“We are allocating extensive resources to provide our patients with the best and most advanced treatment in the world,” she said. “We are entering a new era in medicine.”

“We believe that within a short time, emergency-room lines will become a thing of the past, and we are moving toward a future of precise and rapid medicine that reduces cognitive bias.”

In that future, she said, technology will serve as a lifesaving digital safety net, supporting doctors in their decision-making and freeing them to concentrate on what matters most: their human connection with the patient.

Haifa-based NurExone is preparing for human trials of an experimental therapy that uses engineered exosomes to restore function after spinal cord and optic nerve injuries.

“Our goal is to bring to market a therapy that could help people regain function after spinal cord injuries or restore vision following damage to the optic nerve,” says Dr. Lior Shaltiel, CEO of Haifa-based startup NurExone, which was founded on research conducted at the Technion and Tel Aviv University.

It is an ambitious goal. NurExone is attempting to tackle one of medicine’s most difficult challenges: repairing the central nervous system, where damaged nerves have long been considered largely incapable of regeneration. While doctors have learned to treat many of the complications associated with spinal cord and optic nerve injuries, they have had little success in reversing the damage itself. Patients with severe spinal cord injuries typically do not regain the ability to walk, while damage to the optic nerve often leads to permanent vision loss.

“The moment a spinal cord injury occurs – whether in a car accident or from a partial or complete severing of the cord, for example as the result of a gunshot wound – a secondary injury begins to spread,” explains Dr. Jacob Blumenthal, head of the BrainTech department at the Ehrlich Group, who was involved in the early research conducted at the Technion. “Cells in the affected area begin to die, effectively interrupting communication between the brain and the parts of the body it controls.”

Unlike the peripheral nervous system, where damaged nerves can regenerate, the central nervous system contains biological mechanisms that actively prevent damaged nerve fibers from regrowing.

“If I cut my hand and damage a peripheral nerve, it can regenerate,” explains Yoram Drucker, serial entrepreneur and chairman of NurExone. “But the central nervous system contains molecules that block the rehabilitation of damaged nerves.”

The company’s central question became straightforward: can those biological brakes be temporarily switched off?

Blocking the blocker

One of the key molecules responsible is a protein known as PTEN. Under normal circumstances, PTEN plays a critical role in protecting the body by preventing uncontrolled cell growth, helping suppress cancer. Following a nerve injury, however, the same protein also inhibits the regeneration of damaged nerve cells.

“We know there are inhibitors that prevent nerve growth,” says Drucker. “So the idea was simple: let’s inhibit the inhibitor. If we block the blocker, we allow nerves to regrow.”

The challenge is delivering such treatment directly into damaged nervous tissue without invasive surgery.

NurExone’s approach relies on exosomes, microscopic particles naturally secreted by cells to communicate with one another throughout the body.

“We use exosomes because they can do three things,” Drucker explains. “They naturally migrate toward injured tissue, they help reduce inflammation and promote healing, and they serve as delivery vehicles. We load them with the therapeutic molecule we need, they enter the damaged tissue, release their cargo, and that’s what produces the therapeutic effect.”

The therapeutic cargo consists of a genetically engineered small interfering RNA (siRNA) molecule that temporarily suppresses PTEN activity.

“By temporarily switching off PTEN, we remove the brake on nerve regeneration,” says Shaltiel. “Importantly, we do this only for a short period – roughly two to three weeks after the injury.”

From engineered tissue to exosomes

NurExone’s origins trace back to research led by Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Technion and Prof. Daniel Offen of Tel Aviv University, who later became co-founders of the company.

Initially, Levenberg’s team focused on implanting engineered tissue directly into damaged spinal cords.

“We suddenly saw the rats walking,” she recalls. “We expected to see some improvement, but instead they got up, stood on their own, bore weight and walked almost normally. It was an incredibly exciting moment.”

The next challenge was translating those results into a treatment suitable for people.

Performing spinal cord transplants through invasive surgery would be difficult to apply widely, prompting the researchers to ask whether they could use only the biologically active components released by the cells rather than transplanting the cells themselves.

The answer was exosomes.

“We administered only the exosomes through the nose, and again the rats recovered,” says Levenberg. “The animals began walking again. At that point we realized this could become a practical, non-invasive clinical therapy.”

Manufacturing billions of biological delivery vehicles

Producing exosomes at clinical scale presents another technological challenge.

“We grow the cells in bioreactors at 37 degrees Celsius,” explains Dr. Tali Kizhner, NurExone’s vice president of research and development. “The cells grow on tiny carriers inside the bioreactor and continuously secrete exosomes, allowing us to scale production.”

Founded in 2020, NurExone has raised approximately $20 million and is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Part of the company’s strategy is to pursue regulatory pathways for orphan diseases, which can provide development incentives and potentially accelerate regulatory review.

“This is an extremely active field because there are still no effective treatments,” says Blumenthal. “The first company to successfully commercialize a therapy in this area could gain a significant competitive advantage. Strong patent protection also substantially increases the company’s value.”

The commercial opportunity could also be considerable. Drucker notes that roughly 50,000 new spinal cord injury patients are diagnosed annually across the Western world. The company is also developing treatments targeting optic nerve damage, including glaucoma, which affects an estimated 80 million people worldwide.

NurExone remains in the advanced preclinical stage and is preparing regulatory submissions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The company expects to begin its first human clinical trial in Israel and the United States around 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

But Shaltiel believes the long-term vision extends beyond hospitals.

“Eventually, we’d like to move treatment from the emergency room to the ambulance,” he says. “Someone injured in a car accident could receive the therapy immediately from a paramedic to prevent the loss of nerve cells before they even arrive at the hospital.”

Levenberg shares a similar vision.

“I imagine this becoming available in every emergency department,” she says. “A patient arrives with a spinal cord injury, receives exosome treatment immediately, and we prevent further deterioration while giving the tissue the opportunity to regenerate. If that becomes possible, we could prevent many of the lifelong consequences that spinal cord injuries cause today.”

The vision remains several years away from being tested in humans. But if NurExone’s approach proves successful in clinical trials, it could challenge one of neuroscience’s longest-standing assumptions: that damage to the central nervous system is largely irreversible.

The eye can rebuild lost corneal stem cells by turning old cells back into stem cells, a discovery that could one day help restore vision.

Researchers have found that old, fully mature cells in the cornea can become stem cells again. The cells rebuilt the eye’s stem cell supply even after every last stem cell had been destroyed.

Cells that had nearly stopped dividing pulled off the reversal and kept the tissue healthy for the rest of the animal’s life.

The cornea is the clear dome at the front of the eye, and losing its stem cells can rob a person of sight.

A repair system the body runs on its own raises the prospect that some blindness could one day be reversed without a transplant from a donor.

A cornea rebuilds itself

The cornea keeps itself clear thanks to a small, hidden workforce. Its own limbal stem cells sit in a narrow ring at the outer rim, called the limbus.

Their offspring travel inward to replace surface cells as they wear away.

A team led by Professor Ruby Shalom-Feuerstein, a stem cell biologist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, set out to see what happens when that workforce is gone. 

Working with mice, the researchers stripped away the entire ring of stem cells while leaving the surrounding tissue bed untouched. Through the clear cornea, they tracked the repair.

The cornea grew back. Tracing individual cells showed the new stem cells were not survivors that had escaped the scalpel but ordinary mature corneal cells that had reversed course.

Biologists call this dedifferentiation, a process in which a specialized cell reverts to a stem cell.

A remarkable transformation 

The transformation was remarkably complete.

Within about 40 days, the reverted cells were almost indistinguishable from the cornea’s native stem cells, sharing more than 99 percent of their gene activity. Ordinary corneal cells share only 85 to 90 percent.

They also behaved like the real thing, supplying fresh surface cells and keeping the cornea clear for 6 months.

That result ran against a long-held assumption. Losing a tissue’s stem cells was thought to be irreversible, ending in scarring and disease, which is why serious repair has usually meant transplanting cells from elsewhere. 

“We were surprised to discover that the cornea can regenerate itself even after the destruction of all its stem cells,” said Shalom-Feuerstein.

The oldest cells made a comeback

Cells reversing into stem cells was not new. Earlier work had caught committed cells in fast-renewing tissues doing it.

One influential study showed differentiated cells in the airway becoming stable, working stem cells after the resident ones were removed.

What stayed unclear was the reach of that ability. In those tissues the cells that reverted were young, made only days earlier, so no one knew whether genuinely old cells held the same capacity.

The cornea gave the team a way to test it. Because a corneal cell’s distance from the rim tracks its age, the researchers could pick out the eye’s oldest cells.

These were mature cells sitting at the center that had spent about four months drifting inward and had all but retired from dividing. Even these old cells made a comeback. 

When moved onto a stripped corneal rim, they switched their stem cell programs back on, rebuilt both the quiet reserve and the active working pool, and kept the cornea clear for nearly a year.

An immune cell trigger

Something had to tell those cells to change. The team traced the signal to macrophages, the immune cells that rush to any injury to clear debris and bacteria. 

They flooded the stripped rim within a day or two, and cutting their numbers by about three-quarters left the stem cells largely unable to return.

The macrophages did more than clean up. As they gathered they released signaling molecules.

Two of them, a growth factor called IGF1 and an immune messenger called CCL2, did most of the work of nudging mature cells back toward a stem cell state.

Blocking the pair stalled the repair, and adding them back restored it.

The reversal has its limits

The reversal has firm limits. It only worked when the tissue bed that houses the stem cells came through the injury intact, and it stayed within the cornea’s own family of cells.

When cells from the conjunctiva, the membrane that covers the white of the eye, moved in to repopulate the cornea’s outer rim instead, they could not transform into corneal stem cells.

The surface clouded and filled with blood vessels – the signature of blindness caused by stem cell loss.

The eye is not alone. In the skin, researchers have found that the stem cells responsible for hair color can shift in and out of a stem cell state as their surroundings change. 

The finding suggests this kind of cellular flexibility is a normal part of tissue maintenance, not just an emergency response to injury.

A path toward restoring vision

Whether human corneas can do the same is not yet settled. The experiments ran almost entirely in mice, and the team could not directly test reversal in human corneal cells.

Working with donated human tissue, they found the same macrophage molecules helped cultured human stem cells keep their identity – a sign the pathway may carry over.

The stakes are clearest for people who have lost the cornea’s stem cells to burns, infection, or disease. Their vision is already gone or fading.

The study shows that a mature cell, even a very old one, can revert to a fully functional stem cell and remain that way for life, provided the surrounding tissue and immune cells supply the right signals. 

What remains unknown is how to trigger that process on demand and whether other organs possess the same hidden regenerative ability.

“The next challenge is learning how to control it and how to use it for regenerative medicine,” said Shalom-Feuerstein.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Concrete shapes the world you live in, but its environmental toll is massive. Imagine, though, if the buildings around you could grow and breathe, helping to heal the planet. This isn’t science fiction. It’s the vision of CyanoCement. Developed by researchers from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, this innovative biocement uses ancient microbes to redefine how we think about construction materials.

At the heart of CyanoCement are cyanobacteria, tiny photosynthetic organisms responsible for Earth’s first oxygen-rich atmosphere. By leveraging these extraordinary capabilities, the team—Perla Armaly, Yuval Berger, Lubov Iliassafov, Keren Rosenblau, Yechezkel Kashi, and Shany Barath—crafted a process where these microbes bind minerals and precipitate calcium carbonate, creating a solid without high emissions.

Innovative Design Meets Environmental Responsibility

This biocement doesn’t just end its environmental work once installed. It continues to capture carbon dioxide from the air, actively working against the problem of atmospheric carbon. Unlike conventional methods, CyanoCement turns construction into part of the solution.

The material is designed for facades, interior panels, and decorative structures. By focusing on non-load-bearing elements, the team keeps the project’s ambitions grounded, managing expectations with scientific precision.

Visible Green: A Living, Breathing Material

The green hue of CyanoCement isn’t painted on. It’s the color of life—indicative of the cyanobacteria within. The design makes environmental benefits visible, offering a reassuring sign that sustainability is working, right before your eyes.

This innovative project emerged from the Disrupt Design Lab at Technion, in collaboration with the Applied Genomics Lab, marking a significant crossover between architecture and biology. It’s a fusion rarely seen, yet wholly necessary for the future of sustainable design.

For a unique blend of nature and architecture, explore how the Sofia Pavilion blends urban landscapeswith natural elements.

CyanoCement was honored with the Green Product Award, celebrated for its meaningful impact and robust research. It’s not just talk—this material has substance and intention.

Learn how ancient materials are making a comeback with Finnish designers crafting fashion from shipwreck timber.

As we think about the future of architecture and sustainability, it’s time to reconsider the role of construction. CyanoCement poses a radical idea: buildings that are not only structures but contributors to the atmosphere. An idea that’s difficult to ignore once it takes root in your mind.

Technion-developed technology allows patients to detect dangerous sleep disorders from home using a simple wearable device and artificial intelligence, eliminating need for costly lab tests.

Nearly 40% of the global population suffers from sleep-related disorders, according to the World Health Organization. Among the most serious, and often undiagnosed, conditions is sleep apnea, a disorder estimated to affect nearly one billion people worldwide.

Diagnosing sleep apnea traditionally requires an overnight stay in a specialised sleep laboratory, such as the facility at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. 

Patients are connected to multiple sensors that monitor brain activity, breathing patterns, heart rate, and oxygen levels throughout the night. The process is complex, expensive, and often inaccessible, with costs ranging from $1,170 to $11,700 depending on the clinic.

An Israeli startup, Sleep AI, aims to change that. Developed by researchers at the Technion, the technology uses a lightweight oximeter linked to a mobile app and powered by artificial intelligence. Patients can complete the test from home by simply wearing the device overnight while data is uploaded to the company’s cloud platform for analysis.

Within minutes, physicians receive a detailed medical report that not only evaluates sleep quality, but also maps sleep architecture, identifies signs of sleep apnea, and assesses cardiovascular risks linked to nighttime oxygen deprivation.

Unlike consumer smartwatches, Sleep AI is designed as a medical-grade diagnostic tool. In clinical testing conducted in sleep centres, the system demonstrated an overall accuracy rate of 89% for detecting sleep apnea, rising to 99% for moderate and severe cases.

The company is now pursuing international regulatory approvals with the goal of making sleep apnea diagnosis faster, cheaper, and more widely available — potentially even covered by health insurance in the future.

By moving diagnosis from the sleep lab to the home, Sleep AI hopes to make sleep health screening a routine part of modern medical care.

Researchers at the Technion have discovered how changes in genetic regulatory sequences can lead to alterations in the form and structure of animals – even when genetic regulatory systems are stable and resistant to change. The study, published in Science Advances, was led by Dr. Ella Preger-Ben Noon and Ph.D. candidate Areej Said-Ahmad from the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine.

Photo Credit: Rami Shelush

The loss of morphological traits is a common phenomenon in evolution. Well-known examples include the loss of legs in snakes and the loss of eyes in cavefish. In many cases, such changes do not result from the loss of the genes responsible for these traits, but rather from changes in how those genes are regulated during development. However, many developmental genes are controlled by multiple regulatory sequences with overlapping activity, forming a stable and robust regulatory system.

This study addresses a fundamental question in biology: how do organisms change form over the course of evolution despite the presence of stable genetic regulatory systems? These systems rely on DNA sequences known as enhancers, which activate genes at precise times, levels, and locations during development. Enhancers often act redundantly, so that if one is impaired, others can compensate and maintain proper gene expression. This redundancy confers stability and resistance to change, but also raises a paradox: how do changes in gene expression still occur, leading to alterations in the shape and structure of organs?

To address this question, the researchers focused on Drosophila flies, particularly the species Drosophila sechellia, in which tiny hair-like structures (trichomes) have disappeared from the larval body during evolution. This trait is controlled by the shavenbaby gene, whose expression is regulated by multiple enhancers. Contrary to expectations that such a system would protect gene expression from change, the researchers found that four different enhancers of shavenbaby lost their activity over the course of evolution, each through a distinct mechanism.

Through detailed DNA sequence analysis and functional experiments, the researchers found that the loss of enhancer activity occurred via different molecular mechanisms, including deletion of essential sequences, loss of binding sites for activators and gain of repressor binding sites, acquisition of a silencer, and even the unmasking of pre-existing repression. In other words, the same evolutionary outcome – the loss of gene expression – was achieved through different molecular pathways within the same genomic region.

These findings demonstrate that the same evolutionary outcome can arise through multiple routes. The presence of multiple enhancers, while they contribute to stable gene expression, also creates points of vulnerability where mutations can reduce their activity. The study shows that stability does not necessarily act as a barrier to evolution, as there are diverse molecular ways to circumvent it. These insights are relevant to a wide range of biological systems and deepen our understanding of how variation in form and structure arises in nature.