Montfort launches revolutionary Brain Profiler app, which will be sent with Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe to the International Space Station in 2022.

Article published at www.Israel21C.org on June 29, 2021.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 300 million people worldwide suffer from diagnosable psychiatric disorders such as clinical depression or schizophrenia. But they can only be diagnosed based on the observation and description of symptoms.

That’s the problem Israeli medical startup Montfort (Mon4T)aims to solve with its newly launched Brain Profiler.

This science-based method looks at mental disorders as brain disturbances that can be accurately diagnosed in a clinical manner.

Developed by practicing psychiatrist and Technion lecturer Dr. Abraham Peled, the approach bridges between classical psychiatry and computational neuroscience.

“We cannot fix a system if we do not know exactly what is wrong with it. It is absolutely critical that we discover the causes of mental disorders if we ever hope to cure them,” Peled said.

“The frustration of not being able to truly cure these patients drove me to change my approaches and connect to the digital world and to algorithms, including Montfort’s EncephaLog application.”

Montfort already uses smartphone technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide FDA-cleared digital neurological tests for patients with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease.

As a result of the cooperation with Peled in the past year, Montfort added to its test protocol indicators assessing anxiety, depression and more.

Montfort translates the collected digital indicators into terms that psychiatrists are familiar with, such as depression, anxiety or psychosis, and suggests a neurological explanation, said Peled.

“As a next step, the diagnosed network disturbance will be demonstrated by EEG, a procedure that was previously very complicated to conduct and therefore available only in hospitals, but is now available to any patient at home.”

The Brain Profiler will also be used far from home soon, as it was selected as one of the technologies to accompany Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe on his journey to the International Space Station at the beginning of 2022. The astronauts will use the Montfort app to do motor and cognitive self-tests while physicians on Earth monitor their functioning in real time.

Montfort CEO Dr. Ziv Yekutieli said, “With the complexity of the human brain in general, and psychiatric disorders in particular, psychiatrists have a hard time keeping up with advances in other medical fields. A practitioner has to take clinical decisions based on subjective and non-quantitative data, which is gathered at random, short clinical visits, that do not reflect the patient’s actual status throughout his or her daily life. These difficulties limit the psychiatrist’s ability to treat the patient optimally, and limit pharmaceutical companies’ ability to develop new drugs.”

A hundred million patients the world over benefit from the technology of Diagnostic Robotics — most of them are not even aware of it. Via artificial intelligence and big data analysis, the company from Israel is trying to make the world’s health systems more efficient and to predict the patients’ deterioration. “There are very few opportunities in life to do something with such a big impact.”

Article published at www.forbes.co.il on June 29, 2021.

Total fundraising: $38 million
Employees: 110 employees; 80 of them in Israel
Founders: Yonatan Amir, Kira Radinsky And Moshe Shoham
Founded: 2017
Investors: Mayo Clinic, Maverick, Accelmed, Kobi Richter, Morris Kahn and others

“Throughout the pandemic we all saw what happened when there was a heavy load placed on the health system. In another ten years this load will naturally accumulate and reach similar dimensions to those that we saw during COVID-19,” predicts Dr. Kira Radinsky, acclaimed scientist and alumna of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Radinsky (34), got her start in the world of artificial intelligence and big data at the young age of 15, when she became a student at the Technion. During her doctorate she developed mechanisms for predicting events based on gathering information from news sites and social networks, and among other things, predicted the outbreak of the cholera epidemic in Cuba in 2012. Since then she has added more accomplishments to the list, including selling the start-up SalesPredict, where she served as VP of technology, to eBay.

In 2017 she met with Yonatan Amir (33), also an alum of Forbes Israel’s 30 under 30 list, and Professor Moshe Shoham (founder of Mazor Robotics) and together they founded Diagnostic Robotics — a start-up based on AI technology which assists medical teams to make faster and more accurate diagnostic decisions, and to provide physicians with vital data that will help them make the best decisions. For example, a doctor who receives a patient at the hospital can be assisted by the system in order to quickly determine a triage score for the patient (the index which determines the urgency of treatment).

With the coronavirus outbreak in Israel, another initiative took shape — using Diagnostic’s technology to identify hotspots. In cooperation with the Ministry of Health, the HMOs and other research bodies, a symptoms questionnaire was distributed to the public which helped decision-makers to process data and curb outbreaks in various parts of the country.

“We are looking at the coronavirus system as a triage system in every way. The symptoms which were knowns then to be coronavirus were fever and cough, and by analyzing the answers through our system, within three days we also identified the symptom of loss of taste and smell,” says Radinsky, company chairman. “It was among the insights that we brought to the HMOs and it really changed the triage process because there weren’t enough tests, and in general the health system had to know how to prioritize the division of resources.”

In general, the coronavirus was a boon for the company, as the field of digitalized medicine received a huge boost. “There is a very large wave of inquiries from organizations from the fields of digital medicine, remote consulting and early forecasting,” says Amir, CEO. “With the first wave there was a huge drop in the number of emergency room visits — 42% less. If the medical problem wasn’t very severe, people wouldn’t come… suddenly there was a spike in the use of digital medical systems, alongside the natural development of consumption habits.” 

What are the chances?

Diagnostic’s core business is roughly divided into two parts: on the patient side, the company operates technology for regulating loads through automation in the reception of patients’ data, rapid diagnosis and referrals for further treatment in health institutions; on the health organizations’ side, the company developed a system for preventative medicine, based on the organizations’ databases and the broader historical picture — thanks to which it provides systems with early detection of patients’ chronic diseases, and provides warnings to health organizations. “For example, if a diabetic patient is not treated in time, he will deteriorate to the point that he will turn up at the emergency room,” Amir offers by way of example and clarifies that the price of such a development is paid by both the patient and the institution administering treatment.

“We work across the whole spectrum. In working with health organizations, there are those for whom we are the first to help them with the processes of digitization and automatization, and there are organizations who take our product as a kind of ‘plug and play.’ It’s like a puzzle that can be put together or taken apart.”

“We are building the capacities for medical decision-making so that it can be used to establish an order of actions,” Radinsky continues. “Let’s say I have pain in my lower belly now, and my day is such that I have Zoom calls all day. Just to make an appointment, to get to the doctor and wait for my turn — it’s a whole production. We think about how it could be possible to save ourselves some of the appointments. While booking a doctor’s appointment, the application can ask me. Behind the scenes we can offer a doctor the probability, what percentage it is likely that I have a urinary tract infection. And the HMO decides at what probability a urine test referral should be done, and what probability the doctor should look at the results within three hours and approve antibiotics remotely. So what did we do? We didn’t build the application for the HMO, we didn’t build the digital system for the HMOs, but our tools are in there.”

Diagnostic’s systems integrate a variety of sources of data in real time: from sensors on the body of the patient, to lab test results to analysis of his medical records in the computerized medical file. Naturally, this is a learning system which is constantly improving, and it is important for the company’s people to emphasize that this is anonymous information coming from different health organizations. Israel, by the way, has the second largest medical database in the world.

“In recent years we received access to several billion past medical visits, and we developed tools that know what to ask the patient, to predict how urgent the care is and which tests he needs. We made it possible to automize the medical system. A family doctor today is responsible for over 2,000 patients, and he needs to be responsible for them in a proactive way too: to see deterioration and predict it in time, but that is very hard to do in an efficient way when you have thousands of patients,” says Radinsky.

“We are a company of deep-tech, automation and early detection. What is important to us is to be the necessary piece of the puzzle for leading health organizations. During the pandemic, we connected with additional corporations and sold our technology to governments. We developed different kinds of systems and we want to implement them on top of an existing set of services of health organizations and improve patients’ quality of life,” says Amir. 

Touching millions

Among the company’s clients are hospitals, insurance companies, governments and commercial companies in Israel and around the world, including: Mayo Clinic, Salesforce, Deloitte, the Israeli Ministry of Health, Clalit Health Services [HMO], Leumit Health Services {HMO] and others.

The main market that the company is targeting is in the US, where healthcare spending crossed the 3.8 trillion dollar mark last year: Americans spend $460 to 680 billion dollars a year on emergency medical services, and an average of $350 billion annually on family medicine.

Within about three years, the analysts predict, the general spending on health services will grow to $5.5 trillion. If patients with fitting symptomatic and diagnostic segmentation are referred for a visit to the family doctor as opposed to a specialist — the annual savings are expected to be $170-250 million.

“100 million patients benefit from our technology, through dozens of health organizations all over the world. The company’s sales began officially in 2019, after two years of building the product, and everything grew very rapidly, with the main pricing model being SaaS (Software as a Service).”

110 workers are employed by Diagnostic Robotics: 80 of them are in Tel Aviv, in research and development roles, and 30 in New York are responsible for the marketing, sales and business development. Up until now, funding of $38 million was raised in a series A round, a big part of which was in November 2019, after which the company raised 24 million dollars led by Accelmed , Maverick, Mayo Clinic, billionaires Kobi Richter and Morris Kahn and others. 

“By the end of the year we want to have a major growth round led by leading funds and strategic investors,” says Amir. “Furthermore, we want to continue to grow the rate of revenue and the number of customers, and to reach more organizations, particularly in the American market. We already reached the cream of the crop of the US businesses, so now our goal is how to begin to work in a top-down approach, and to begin to supply smaller organizations and deploy systems at a rapid pace.”

“We are about to publish new scientific articles. One of them shows how our technology successfully anticipates medical deterioration as much as a half year or a full year in advance, and this has great clinical value,” Radinsky adds. “We are talking about a clinical trial on a very large scale — in other words, it gives it the clinical seal of approval. For the first time we have data from billions of past visits and can save the lives of many, and if not save them then at least extend many lives by at least five years.”

According to Radinsky, the success, as they see it, is in the fact that they are touching hundreds of millions of people’s lives, and not the value of the company. “The clinical impact and also the business growth of the company is what is important — not the rounds of funding.”

Amir displays a more business-oriented approach. “In the end, in order to build big companies, the company really needs a strong financial backbone, the kind that can fund more and more innovation and products. We are in territory where we can built a company of a few billion dollars. If at another time it was unusual to speak of unicorns — today it happens at a high speed, for a lot of reasons. We know how to get there in a relatively simple and clear way. We are strong technologically, and are at the forefront of companies providing advanced technology.”

“I think that there are very few opportunities in life to do something with a big impact that will totally change the worldview in such an important field — like the one in which we work. I am proud that we are in this field, the impact that we are making, and that the company is also growing significantly on the business level in order to help us make more and more of an impact,” Radinsky concludes.

The study is expected to lead to a deeper understanding of biological processes, as well as developments that will allow for an early diagnosis of a variety of diseases

Article published at www.jpost.com on July 4, 2021.

Israeli Technion researchers, in collaboration with international partners, have reached a breakthrough in identifying the genetic profiles of single cells, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Methods last month.

The paper follows SMPS19 (Single-Molecule Proteins Sequencing), an international conference held in Jerusalem in 2019 organized by Prof. Amit Meller of the Technion’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering. 

In the paper, the researchers discuss the developments made in technologies aimed at decoding the protein profile of single cells. They also described future protein sequencing technologies and identification on the individual molecular level. 

An example of such technologies being developed at the Technion’s ILaboratory involves nanometric sensors, which allow the direct sensing of individual proteins. Labelled with fluorescent dyes, the proteins flow through the sensors and the optical signals are analyzed by a deep learning-based system, which has also been developed in the Technion lab.

The study, which has been supported by the European Union, the Israeli Science Foundation and the Azrieli Fellowship Program, is expected to lead to a deeper understanding of biological processes, as well as the development of highly sensitive medical tests that will allow for an early diagnosis of a variety of diseases.

The collaborative study was led by Meller, along with Prof. Chirlmin Joo of the Netherland’s Delft University and Dr. Javier Alfaro of Poland’s Gdansk University.

Some 3 million people worldwide miss tuberculosis diagnosis every year, often because tests unavailable; Haifa-made skin sticker will help, scientists say

Article published at www.timesofisrael.com on July 5, 2021.

A new Israeli tuberculosis-detecting skin patch will reduce the huge number of people who die from the disease due to a lack of diagnosis, and could help the world eradicate it altogether, scientists say.

Tuberculosis is responsible for 1.4 million deaths a year, almost exclusively in poor countries. It is easily transmitted by sneezing, spitting and coughing, and each infected person passes it to more than 10 people on average.

Treatment is available, but cases are often missed due to poor provision of tests, which require lab processing.

The World Health Organization has considered tuberculosis a “global health emergency” since 1993, and highlights the power of testing, reporting that an estimated 60 million lives were saved through diagnosis and treatment between 2000 and 2019. But testing infrastructure is poor, and around 3 million cases are missed annually.

A research team from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has revealed, in a peer-reviewed journal article, that it has produced and tested a patch that gives a diagnosis an hour after it is attached to the skin.

“The patch contains sensors made from nanoparticles, and what we’re doing is sensing changes in the smell pattern of the person, which can tell us with high accuracy whether or not they have tuberculosis,” Dr. Rotem Vishinkin told The Times of Israel.

“Simplifying diagnosis is important for detecting cases and enabling people to be treated, and this is our focus,” added Vishinkin, whose team hopes it will help healthcare providers in the developing world to eradicate the disease.

She carried out the research under the supervision of Prof. Hossam Haick, a pioneer of disease detection using smell, whose past work is the basis for a new respiratory monitoring device that is being developed with a major European Union grant.

The main advantage of the new tuberculosis patch is that it can expand testing way beyond areas where there is a good infrastructure of clinics and labs, said Vishinkin.

“The patch is simple to use, and just needs to be placed on the skin,” she said.

In the current model, a computer is needed to provide results, but the final product will automatically transmit results to a cellphone or to a clinic, Vishinkin added.

With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, her team has tested the patch on 1,000 people — in South Africa, India and Latvia — and it showed 90 percent sensitivity. More testing is underway, and the Technion team hopes to get the product on the market within a few years.

Vishinkin said that the nano-sticker format could in the future be used to diagnose other diseases, helping to reduce missed cases for a range of conditions.

“We are working to promote close research cooperation and to turn the Technion into a hub for many diverse industries, a platform where industry and academia meet.”

Article published at www.jpost.com on June 21, 2021.

A computer-generated redition of the nano-satellites in orbit (photo credit: Courtesy)

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Israel Aerospace Industries’ (IAI) Space Division are partnering to literally reach for the stars by developing and launching a nano-satellite to orbit the moon.

The project, which is to be carried out by Technion students with the help of IAI space engineers and facilities, will begin at the start of the 2021/22 academic year in October and will progress until it finishes in a few years’ time.

The project is also being assisted through a major effort by the Technion Faculty of Aerospace Engineering to balance aeronautics and outer space.

“While in the past only about 10% of the faculty syllabus was dedicated to space, in the past few years there has been an effort to change this and reach a more equal balance between the two fields,” Faculty dean Prof. Tal Shima said in a statement.

“To achieve this. we updated the faculty curriculum and we are currently in the process of hiring new staff members with expertise in outer space. Cooperation with IAI’s space facility will allow us to expose students to additional joint projects with IAI focused on space. This is a fascinating field where activity in Israel and the world is stepping up and I hope to see as many students as possible focusing on it.”

The project will be headed by Prof. Gil Yudilevitch for the Technion, and by Technion alumnus and current IAI space engineer Niko Adamsky for IAI.

“The project will allow students to become partners in a project with the industry and help them reach the end of their studies prepared to be integrated into Israel’s developing space industry,” Yudilevitch explained.

“The interface between academia and industry is changing fast and the Technion is investing great efforts in being established in Israel and internationally,” Technion president Prof. Uri Sivan said at a signing ceremony.

“We are working to promote close research cooperation and to turn the Technion into a hub for many diverse industries, a platform where industry and academia meet. We are quickly working to commercialize technologies that originated on campus.”

“As an alumnus of the Technion, accompanying projects and different mentoring programs over the years, I am excited by the existing and future cooperation between IAI and the Technion,” IAI president and CEO Boaz Levy explained.

“We must strengthen cooperation with the Technion, especially the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, which is unique to its kind in Israel, and which holds a leadership position among similar faculties worldwide. Increasing our cooperation with the Technion produces added value to both sides and will help us strengthen and integrate in creating groundbreaking, challenging, and leading technology in Israel and abroad. To this end, it is important we formulate together the image of the engineer we envision – an involved engineer with system-wide perspective and deep business understanding and research capabilities.”

This is not the first time IAI and Technion have collaborated together for nano-satellite technology. In August 2020, Technion and IAI collaborated to develop an advanced and unique innovative receiver and a satellite computer as part of the Adelis-SAMSON project. Said project saw Technion launch three autonomous nano-satellites called CubeSats on March 20, 2021. The satellites were launched from Kazakhstan onboard a Glavkosmos Soyuz rocket, and each 8 kg. satellite came equipped with sensors, control systems and navigation tools.

This was not the Israeli university’s first foray into space. In 1998, Technion launched the Gurwin-TechSat II. Eleven years later, that satellite is still in orbit.

However, this is not the first time an Israeli university has launched nano-satellites. In February, a nanosatellite designed, developed, assembled and tested by Tel Aviv University was launched from a NASA launch facility in Virginia.

The development and launching of nanosatellites is seen by some experts as being a part of the the “Civil Space Revolution.” Also called New Space, this term refers to how the field of satellites is no longer limited to just massive, well-funded companies. This is especially notable, as many experts believe the nanosatellite field will be critical in maintaining high-speed Internet and communications in the future.

Technion had already joined New Space with the Adelis-SAMSON satellites, and now this new project could see them go a little farther.
Maayan Hoffman and Sarah Chemla contributed to this report.

Tel Aviv, our famous Startup Nation capital, may be losing the luster it once had. Following a year marked by social distancing and isolation, tech companies, startups, and most importantly, employees, discovered the benefits of working from home. In fact, startup hubs all over the world emptied out due to the comfort of remote work.

Article published at timesofisrael.com on June 15, 2021.

Tel Aviv, our famous Startup Nation capital, may be losing the luster it once had. Following a year marked by social distancing and isolation, tech companies, startups, and most importantly, employees, discovered the benefits of working from home. In fact, startup hubs all over the world emptied out due to the comfort of remote work.

As the country begins fully opening up again following our mass vaccination campaign, many job candidates are no longer looking to suffer traffic and expenses to work in a Tel Aviv office. So with young prospective tech candidates leaving to the periphery, where should they go?

Not just quality of life

For years the government has implemented programs attempting to incentivize young people to move outside of Israel’s center—including tax and housing benefits. But the pandemic year has proven to be a far more persuasive method of moving people to the peripheries, drawing young families searching for a house with a backyard for the same price as a two-bedroom Tel Aviv apartment with no balcony. Nefesh B’Nefesh states that some of the more affordable destinations for housing can be found in Katzrin, a town in the Golan Heights. Houses there can be found for a fifth of the price per square foot in Tel Aviv, and a fourth of the price per square foot in Jerusalem. Most of the communities outside of the center tend to be more tight-knit, and remote workers can enjoy the perks of areas without having to worry about hours-long commutes to the center of the country. Living outside of Gush Dan goes beyond just comfort—Israel’s north, specifically, holds huge potential to become a new thriving center for innovation.

Northern tech hub

Haifa’s Technion—Israel Institute of Technology—is Israel’s biggest scientific-technological university and home to one of the world’s largest research centers. The university is known to produce some of Israel’s most promising entrepreneurs. Many of the world’s most prominent tech companies have already set up shop in Haifa, including the likes of Intel Corporation, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Dell Technologies, Qualcomm, IBM, and many more. The northern tech hub is brimming with pioneering technologies, profitable business opportunities, high investment returns, and an extensive talent pool. With the shakeup the tech ecosystem experienced in the past year and the influx of new people, innovators should look to the north as the next potential center for startups.

Diversity to drive innovation

An additional advantage of building a tech workplace up north is that it provides far more opportunity for a diverse workforce. Tel Aviv’s high-tech industry is known to lack diversity, with less women, Arabs, and Ultra-Orthodox in the workplace. A tech startup in the periphery that employs people from more diverse backgrounds could benefit from less groupthink and more differing ideas, which has proven to drive innovation. As stated by CTech, the participation of these groups in the high tech industry will have a double benefit. It will increase the number of workers from those sectors in the Israeli economy, and also serve as an infusion of new and diverse brainpower into the high tech industry. It also goes without saying that the diversification of Israel’s high tech industry will further enable it to address more effectively the needs of the ever-changing global market.

The path ahead

Despite a turbulent year of changes on a global level, Israeli startups managed to power ahead, breaking new records in funding and IPOs. The pandemic accelerated many digitization processes, and the Israeli tech sector met and exceeded the demand through the creation of even more solutions and upgrades. Looking ahead, Israeli tech will continue to develop and mature into profitable growth companies that are sustainable in the long term on the path to become unicorns. As the sector continues to flourish, it can find roots outside of the Tel-Aviv bubble. More young potential employees are setting their sights on the north for the greenery, community, and cost-of-living. As such, it is up to entrepreneurs to similarly consider the benefits presented by the north, and take advantage of the huge potential the northern tech hub has in order to build on it.

The scientists found a way to drastically simplify the production of optical components used across industries.

Article published at www.jpost.com on June 17, 2021.

Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering at Technion University. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Technion University scientists have discovered a way to improve and simplify the production of precise optical components, which are necessary in many fields, by immersing them in a certain liquid. The study, led by PhD student Reut Orange-Kedem and Prof. Yoav Shechtman from the Technion Faculty of Bioengineering, was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Optical components are vital to microscopy, telescopy, medical imaging, fiber optics, lasers, and more. Despite their importance, they are typically complex and costly to produce.

Orange-Kedem and Shechtman developed a novel process of manufacturing these elements – using a 3D printer instead of requiring a cleanroom. This method makes optical components faster and cheaper to create.

To achieve this, the scientists immersed the optical component in liquid: a mix of water and glycerol – a cheap substance widely used in many industries, including as a food additive.

Light moves at different speeds through different substances. For example, it slows down when passing through water or glass. This difference in speed is called the material’s refractive index. The refractive index of the liquid the scientists used is very close to that of their optical component.

The simplicity of the newly discovered process also allows for the production of more complex components that were near impossible to make using traditional methods.

This accomplishment puts a better and more accessible tool into the hands of scientists and industries across various fields.

Technion scientists succeed in drastically simplifying the production of optical components used across industries

People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was; but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings. Exodus 10:23 (The Israel BibleTM)

Article published at www.israel365news.com on June 16, 2021.

Reut Orange-Kedem (courtesy)

Precise optical components are vital for many fields including medical imaging, fiber optics, lasers, microscopy, telescopy, lithography, and holographic lighting and more. In the field of bioengineering, they are crucial for 3D microscopy – but their production is extremely challenging.

The precision required in the manufacturing process of diffractive optical elements (DOEs) is on the nanometric scale (one millionth of a millimeter), so it is complicated, requires high precision and can be done only in a “clean room” – factors that make it expensive.

Scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have now dramatically improved and simplified the production of manufacturing precise optical components by immersing them in liquid. The study, led by doctoral student Reut Orange-Kedem and Prof.Yoav Shechtman from the Technion’s Faculty of Bioengineering, was published in the journal Nature Communications under the title “3D printable diffractive optical elements by liquid immersion.”

Shechtman is also a member of the Technion’s Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute and the Lorry I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences & Engineering, while Orange-Kedem is a Ph.D. student under his supervision.

The scientists developed an innovative process of manufacturing these elements that significantly simplifies the production, enabling optical components to be made using a regular 3D printer.

This method makes optical components fast and inexpensive to create and also makes it possible to increase the complexity of the elements produced – and all this without minimizing precision.

To achieve this, the scientists immersed the optical component in liquid – a mix of water and glycerol (a cheap substance widely used across industries, including as a food additive). Light moves at different speeds through different substances. For example, it slows down when passing through water or glass. This difference in speed is called the material’s refractive index, and the refractive index of the liquid the scientists used is very close to that of their optical component.

Under those conditions, the optical component needs to be 1,000 times larger to function, which is just what the scientists wanted. Being larger, the component is now much easier to produce and much less sensitive to manufacturing errors. Instead of a lengthy and complex process requiring a cleanroom, it can now be manufactured using a regular 3D printer.

The simplicity of the process also allows for the production of more complex components that were nearly impossible using traditional methods. In addition, the novel components are also tuneable, unlike their traditional predecessors, through manipulation of the glycerol concentration. Overall, the Technion team said this is an achievement in optics that puts a better and cheaper tool into the hands of scientists and industries across multiple fields.

Prof. Marcelle Machluf’s life’s work, creating a medicine delivery system that can defeat cancer, is showing promising progress, aiming for clinical trials by 2023

Article published at www.calcalistech.com on June 22, 2021.

NanoGhost inventor and co-founder, Prof. Marcelle Machluf Photo: Technion

“My dream, and if we reach it I know I did my part, is having this technology work on one kind of cancer. Having patients’ life quality improve because of it,” said Prof. Marcelle Machluf, the co-founder and inventor of NanoGhost about the technology she has been developing for over a decade. “Pharma companies understand today, that the delivery is as important as the medicine itself.”

Machluf’s NanoGhost technology targets cancer cells with modified adult stem cells loaded with medicine. It is an advanced delivery system that uses the stem cell as a carrier to attack cancer. “We use the cell’s ability to reach the cancer, but we don’t want it to get there as a live cell. So we take a stem cell, empty it, and create a ghost,” said Yonatan Malca, NanoGhost CEO and co-founder. “Why is it a ghost? Because it’s not a living cell anymore but you keep parts of it. You also shrink them to nano-size, so you have nano-ghost vesicles,” he explained.

“Now you can take these nanovesicles and load them with medicine, creating a trojan horse that goes into the cancer and fights it. We create the homing missiles, and you can put whichever warhead you want on it. Selectiveness is the most important attribute here, bringing the medicine directly to the target,” Malca said.

Machluf and Malca define their company as a bio-convergence company, meaning the technology is based on biology as well as engineering. They describe a diverse lab where bioengineers, chemists, biologists, and physics all work shoulder to shoulder building on each other’s theory. Machluf, who is also the faculty dean of Biotechnology & Food Engineering at the Technion, is long used to such a multidisciplinary environment.

Machluf began the research that led to NanoGhost in 2010 in her Technion lab, which “dealt with drug delivery on the one hand and tissue engineering on the other,” she explained. “So I had students working on the same cells we are discussing here, but they engineered them to release medicine. Simultaneously, we had a different program around HIV where we wanted to create a decoy and fool the virus, similar to what they are doing today with Covid. So we developed particles that resemble cells and are supposed to fool the virus. And then I asked myself, why aren’t we doing this with cancer as well.”

NanoGhost co-founder and CEO, Yonatan Malca Photo: Courtesy

NanoGhost has already raised $5 million in its seed round, with aMoon serving as a lead investor. The hope is to reach animal testing in a year and clinical trials by 2023. “Our strategy is to try and avoid partnering with others by using accessible assets, but we still have diverse tests,” Malca explained. “We are testing two kinds of chemo medicines that are very effective but very toxic so they are applied in a limited manner when used in treatment today. What we try to do is to target the cancer with our vesicles loaded with these medicines, and if we succeed, we can maximize their effects.”

“Our other tests are in the field of immuno-oncology, where we try and get the body’s immune system to attack the cancer. You essentially manipulate the body to do so. In one test we use messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to the Covid vaccine. In the other immuno-oncology test we are doing, we try to have our delivery system deliver an antigen to the cancer that the body will recognize as foreign and attack it, and by doing so attack the cancer,” Malca continued.

Both Machluf and Malca emphasized there is still much work needed to be done before they can claim victory over cancer. However, they assert “the system works. Period.” Malca went on to explain that “the secret component exists, the nano ghost reaches the cells, you can load them with medicine. We clearly see it works and will work in humans, the question is not if it will work or not, but if we can deliver it with the right medicine in the right amount and right profile.”

Honoring her scientific achievements, Prof. Machluf was chosen to light a torch at Israel’s 70th Independence Day Ceremony three years ago. In her speech, Prof. Machluf celebrated, among other things, her colleagues, “scientists whose research and inventions defeat every challenge, move mankind forward and glorify our nation.”

Startup’s blood test aims to predict which cancer patients will react better to treatment; 8 clinical trials will be set up in the UK

Article published at www.timesofisrael.com on June 17, 2021.

Illustrative image of a cancer patient (KatarzynaBialasiewicz; iStock by Getty Images)

Israel-based startup OncoHost, the developer of a blood test to predict how well cancer patients will react to treatment, said it will collaborate with the National Health Service (NHS) to set up eight clinical trial sites in the United Kingdom.

The trials will focus on patients diagnosed with advanced stages of melanoma or non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), aiming to predict their response to immunotherapy treatment. Partnering with the NHS will give the OncoHost “a tremendous opportunity” to expand its research and enhance its technology’s capabilities, the company said.

The new trial sites will join OncoHost’s ongoing study, which uses the company’s host response profiling platform, called PROphet.

“Immunotherapy has achieved excellent results in certain situations for several cancers, allowing patients to achieve longer control of their cancer with maintained quality of life and longer survival,” said Dr. David Farrugia, consultant medical oncologist at NHS and chief investigator of all eight NHS clinical trial sites. “However, success with immunotherapy is not guaranteed in every patient, so this PROPHETIC study is seeking to identify changes in proteins circulating in the blood which may help doctors to choose the best treatment for each patient.”

PROphet is a diagnostic platform that combines a large-scale study of proteins with AI to predict patient response to immunotherapy and identify resistance to processes. The platform scans over 1,000 proteins in a patient’s blood samples, and combined with bioinformatic and machine learning-based algorithms developed by OncoHost, analyzes protein changes in the blood samples to monitor the biological processes happening in the patient, in response to a certain cancer therapy. This profile is then “highly predictive” of how patients will react, thus enabling personalized treatment planning, the company said. This helps provide clinicians with potential combination strategies to overcome treatment resistance.

Previous studies conducted in the US and Israel have shown that PROphet has “high accuracy” in predicting how patients with NSCLC and melanoma will respond to various therapies, the company said in a statement.

“In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that immunotherapy is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. At OncoHost, we leverage cutting-edge proteomic and AI-based host response science, aiming to deliver on the most pressing issue in oncology today – resistance to cancer treatment,” said Dr. Ofer Sharon, CEO of OncoHost. “Our PROPHETIC study provides a more in-depth understanding of patients’ responsiveness to therapy and partnering with the NHS will give us a tremendous opportunity to expand our research, enhance our technology’s capabilities and increase our knowledge in the field to provide the ultimate solution for oncologists and physicians.”

This collaboration comes ahead of the launch of the PROphet software later this year, the company said. OncoHost continues to open additional clinical trial sites around the world and will be expanding its research to other cancers including ovarian cancer, head and neck cancers and urogenital cancers, hoping to enable an early identification of non-responsiveness to cancer treatment and the discovery of new targets to overcome treatment resistance.

The work is based on a decade of research by Prof. Yuval Shaked of the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.

Shaked’s work has pioneered a new field in cancer research that looks not only at how patients tumor cells react to cancer treatment but at how the patients themselves react to a wide variety of therapies, demonstrating the body’s “contribution” to tumors’ possible resilience.

Automotive companies like Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, GM, and Waymo (Google’s self-driving project) are racing to bring autonomous vehicles to the mainstream market. In Israel, companies like Yandex and Intel’s Jerusalem-based subsidiary Mobileye have been on the streets for several years, testing self-driving cars powered by their technologies.

Article published at www.nocamels.com on May 20, 2021.

Ford autonomous vehicle. Photo by Ruslan Berdichevsky.

Automotive companies like Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, GM, and Waymo (Google’s self-driving project) are racing to bring autonomous vehicles to the mainstream market. In Israel, companies like Yandex and Intel’s Jerusalem-based subsidiary Mobileye have been on the streets for several years, testing self-driving cars powered by their technologies.

US auto giant Ford has also joined the fray to roll out a fully autonomous vehicle capable of Level 4 automation. Last year, Ford announced a partnership with Mobileye to offer next-generation driver-assistance systems across the company’s global product lineup.

Ford has also been working with another Israeli team to help reach the finish line. SAIPS (Signal Analysis and Image Processing Services), an Israeli computer vision and machine learning company acquired by Ford, has played an important role in the company’s plans to deliver a high-volume, fully autonomous vehicle for ride-sharing or ride-hailing. Ford had announced these plans in 2016, doubling its Silicon Valley team and selecting four companies, including SAIPS, to drive it forward by boosting development and in-house capabilities.

Ford autonomous vehicle. Photo by Ruslan Berdichevsky.

While the launch has been postponed to 2022 — an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic — Ford has already received approval from Israel’s Transportation Ministry to begin test-driving driverless Ford Fusions on Israeli roads. The cars will be operated by Ford’s research and development center in Israel, established in 2019 in southern Tel Aviv. The center is led by Technical Director Udy Danino, SAIPS co-founder and CEO.

The center serves as a research incubator that works with Ford’s R&D teams from all over the world, and also as a base for the 45 employees that currently make up SAIPS, many of them graduates of the IDF’s Talpiot and 8200 units.

Founded in 2013 by Danino, Chief Technology Officer Rotem Littman, and US Branch Manager Noga Zieber, SAIPS was not originally conceived as a company focused solely on the automotive industry. Instead, its mission was to design, develop, and implement algorithmic suites that provide solutions for computer vision challenges in fields like semiconductors, gaming, medicine, sports, mobile communications, and retail.

The company pivoted when it was snapped up by Ford in 2016. CTO Littman tells NoCamels the acquisition, which happened by chance when Ford was in Israel scouting for startups was “a good opportunity for both sides.”

The SAIPS team. Photo by Dana Berman.

“We had about 20 customers overall in the first three years, from small startups to American corporations,” he says, “But the automotive industry has taken us to a place where we can make a significant contribution to the field. Ford was just a very good fit to our capabilities and interests.”

SAIPS technology for Ford

Littman tells NoCamels that SAIPS is involved in various aspects of Ford’s autonomous vehicle development and has “a significant part in each of them.” The company develops real-time algorithms that help the autonomous vehicle understand its environment and solve challenging problems on the road such as action recognition, detection, localization, tracking, and prediction in adverse conditions using 2D and 3D sensor data fusion.

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has determined the intelligence level and automation capabilities of autonomous vehicles based on a ranking system from Level 0, a vehicle manually controlled by a human to Level 5, a vehicle where all human interaction is eliminated. For its part, SAIPS is using its technology to give Ford vehicles Level 3 and Level 4 capabilities, ultimately aiming to help the auto giant develop a vehicle that is able to intervene if things go wrong or there is a system failure.

Rotem Littman, co-founder of SAIPS

“Level 5 is fully autonomous and working in any condition without a driver in the vehicle. This is the dream result. Level 4 is similar, but it just the works in a bit of limited conditions. It can work in a geo-fenced area. It may work in center of Tel Aviv, but it doesn’t work outside Tel Aviv because it hasn’t been mapped. The vehicle is not familiar with the environment. Another condition is that it may work only in the daylight and not at night, or for example, in summer and not in winter when there is snow,” Littman explains.

SAIPS is working on a few major components for Ford, including the development of algorithms that connect with the precise three-dimensional mapping needed of the self-driving vehicle’s surroundings.

“For Level 4, you usually need a highly detailed map of the environment. That’s what we’ve been working on,” he explains. “Unlike maps like Google Maps or Waze, where you have a graphic description of the environment, you have the roads and the turns but it doesn’t need to be centimeter-level accuracy for humans to understand how to navigate. For autonomous vehicles, we need significantly more accurate maps. These are in the centimeter-level accuracy, 3D maps. These are 3D maps that include all of the environment that we’re driving in, including the 3D structure of the road, the pavement, the buildings, even the vegetation around us, and where the traffic lights and traffic signs are. So all of the physical world and all of the driving rules of the road that the vehicle needs to take into account.”

If you create precise algorithms to the vehicle, it doesn’t need to map the environment It just needs to understand where it is on the map and then find the objects that are not part of the map — objects like other vehicles, pedestrians, or anything that is not part of the static map, according to Littman.

Other components that SAIPS is tackling include perception, or the detection, tracking, and prediction of dynamic objects in the scene around the vehicle and decision making, or how the vehicle should react after it is given all the inputs, mapping, and perception.

Ford self-driving vehicles on Israeli roads

While the last several years have seen the testing of self-driving vehicles on roads around the world, conducted by companies like Uber, Apple, and Tesla, Ford is ready to carve out its own spot.

“At first, Ford’s analysts thought that they had joined too late because [other companies] said they would launch autonomous vehicles in 2019. That didn’t happen,” Littman tells NoCamels, “But Ford said initially, they don’t want to be first, they want to be last. They want to be the last remaining in the race. They understand that it’s a long race. They have a larger investment in it and they want to build it properly from day one. They want to be the last man standing.”

Ford Motor Company Executive Chairman Bill Ford opens the Ford Research Center in Tel Aviv. Photo by Simona Shemer.

Alongside SAIPS and other startups, Ford has partnered with Argo AI, a Pennsylvania-based autonomous vehicle startup to develop its self-driving technology. Ford and German automaker Volkswagon AG also split an 80 percent majority stake in in the company earlier this year.

“We have two giants working together on this technology. It also shows you how the belief that Volkswagen had in order to stop its independent development and join with Ford in this endeavor. We believe that today Ford is in a good place,” Littman says.

According to Littman, Argo AI is currently testing Ford autonomous vehicles in Florida, Washington DC, Texas, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, and Michigan. Ford will also begin testing vehicles in Tel Aviv because “we need test technologies locally.”

“It makes it much easier to test vehicles [in Tel Aviv] because we have our presence and the Ford Research Center,” Littman adds.

As Ford continues to prepare for self-driving vehicles, and upgrade higher resolution cameras, radar sensors, 3D mapping, and other advanced technology, SAIPS will also play a significant role in the upcoming launch, expected in 2022.

“Ford talked to some of our customers and saw the amazing contribution we were making with such a small workforce. And they said they had to have us in the company. I think today we are considered a Ford success story,” Littman says, “Four years later, Ford tells us that they made a great investment in us. We’re working hard to continue that impression.”