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High schoolers’ robotic platform shuttles supplies to and from the coronavirus ward while controlled remotely by medical staff.

Article published at www.israel21c.or on April 12, 2020.

The battle against coronavirus in Israel just got a helping hand from an unexpected source: the robotics club at the prestigious Hebrew Reali School in Haifa.

Students and alumni of the robotics club, called “Galaxia 5987 in memory of David Zohar,” answered a call from Rambam Medical Center and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. In under a week, they developed a robot according to the hospital’s requirements.

The Reali School’s robotics club and alumni with their CoRobot robotic prototype. Photo courtesy of Technion Spokesperson’s Office

The prototype robotic platform, CoRobot, can shuttle supplies to and from the coronavirus ward to minimize the need for medical staff to enter and risk catching the highly infectious virus.

CoRobot can be remotely operated by medical staff using a joystick or a smartphone app. They can see what is happening through the video camera attached to the robot.

CoRobot can transport supplies to patients while minimizing the need for human medical staff to enter infectious wards. Photo courtesy of Technion Spokesperson’s Office

“If the robot will successfully pass its installation at Rambam, in a relatively short amount of time we will be able to build more robots for Rambam and for similar departments in other Israeli hospitals,” says Prof. Alon Wolf, the Technion’s VP for External Relations and Resource Development.

Wolf is also a robotics expert who heads the the FIRST robotics program in Israel. FIRST is an international educational organization that uses robotics competitions to promote entrepreneurship and learning among young children and youth.

FIRST ISRAEL, led by Technion, runs hundreds of groups across the country. According to Wolf, should the robot prove successful, additional FIRST groups across Israel will join the effort.

Technion Prof. Gil Yudilevitch, who leads the Reali robotics program, added that more is in store for CoRobot.

“In the next stage the robot will incorporate a communication system that will include a screen, camera, microphone and speaker, and will be able to move from patient to patient and transmit information to the medical staff in real time. I hope that in the future we will add features that will help with the actual treatment, such as sensors that will check patients’ pulse rates and blood oxygen levels,” he says.

For the first time in over a century, we are faced with a pandemic of unpredictable proportions.

Article published by the president of the Technion April 07, 2020.

A tiny, invisible virus took humanity by surprise, affecting the lives of all of us, causing uncertainty and worry for the wellbeing of our families and friends. Such times remind us of the true value of friendship and solidarity within our closer and wider circles of life. They also underscore the power of science and technology, be it medical care or the information technology that keeps us connected while maintaining social distancing.

The situation in Israel is more or less under control. The rate of infection is still high, but we have started seeing a minute positive effect of the broad lockout. The next days will tell how well we are containing the plague. On March 17th, one day before the opening of the spring semester, the Technion was officially shut down in accordance with government regulations. After taking all necessary steps to secure the health of our staff and students, Technion swiftly moved online. I am proud to report that the semester began on March 18th, on schedule, with a comprehensive program for distance teaching for all our students. All lectures and tutorials are being taught as scheduled, barring lab classes, which are on hold temporarily. Our first online survey reported an overwhelming 97.5% satisfaction by students and faculty alike, which is a credit to the unprecedented mobilization of our devoted staff, faculty members and the Students Association, who worked tirelessly to get the online semester up and running. This achievement also highlights the solidarity, agility, and improvisation skills that many times present themselves in Israel in a time of crisis.

COVID-19 presents a global challenge, which ultimately requires global scientific and technological solutions. The combination of science, engineering and a medical school quickly put Technion at the forefront of this fight. The close cooperation between Technion, hospitals and industry constitutes a unique resource for facilitating speedy healthcare solutions for the benefit of humanity. Within three weeks, Technion researchers in nearly 30 labs, and growing fast, have begun working round the clock to fight the spread of COVID-19 through targeted emergency research projects, while collaborating closely with the health system in order to find immediate solutions. The projects are diverse, including advanced diagnostic techniques, personalized medical treatment, targeted drug delivery, treatment protocols based on machine learning and AI, big data management, and robots for remote medical care. In addition, Technion and Rambam Health Care Campus are collaborating closely on a number of emergency projects that are critical to minimizing the exposure and infection of the hospital’s staff by the corona patients.

The current crisis is also imposing a financial strain on Technion students and employees. Government regulations limited employment to 30% of the workforce, and recently reduced this number to 15%, sending thousands of students and employees to seek support from Social Security. To help our students, Technion, in collaboration with the American Technion Society, has set up an emergency student fund. Simultaneously, to support our employees, the senior academic staff has voluntarily waived part of their salary in the next few months towards the establishment of a solidarity fund. It is heartwarming to witness how united the Technion family is—students, employees, faculty, and supporters.

As difficult as things are, the lessons learned during the present crisis also offer new opportunities. Under the circumstances, we had to switch in one week from traditional teaching in classrooms to fully-fledged online teaching, a feat that would have taken months under normal conditions. This is not to say that online teaching will substitute personal encounters; on the contrary—the limitations of the former have also become evident during this forced large-scale experiment. However, a new hybrid of frontal and online teaching will probably emerge, offering remarkable opportunities for globalization, joint programs with universities abroad, and much more.
The same is true for research. The number of local and international collaborations with academia, industry, research institutes, and hospitals has grown exponentially, confirming the value of partnership and demonstrating that much of the communication can, in fact, be carried out online. Paradoxically, the social distancing imposed on us confirmed the importance of collaboration and the fact that geography no longer presents a barrier. The world has become even flatter, in Thomas Friedman’s words.

Dear friends across the world, our minds and hearts are with you, wherever you are. Next week we will be celebrating an unusual Passover, one of isolation and distancing from our loved ones. This celebration of spring and rejuvenation will be overcast by the present situation, but I’m confident that we will all emerge from this crisis soon, with insight, strength, and even stronger bonds. At these difficult times, I thank you wholeheartedly for your continued commitment and friendship.

Once campuses were shut down nationwide in mid-March, it took a little over a week for all academic institutions in Israel to shift their curriculum, almost in its entirety, to the web.

Article published at www.calcalistech.com on April 03, 2020.

One thing is clear to all academic institutions in Israel: campuses will never be the same following the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. This global experiment in remote learning, imposed by lockdowns, will have a dramatic impact on how academic studying is conducted in the future.

It took a little over a week once campuses were shut down nationwide in mid-March for all academic institutions in Israel to shift their curriculum, almost in its entirety, to the web. All these institutions are now preparing for the possibility of finishing the semester without students having met with faculty face to face even once, and, for the first time in Israel’s academic history, no one is doubting the validity of this option.

Technion University campus in Haifa. Photo: Technion

Israeli universities and colleges have known for years that they must prepare for a new era of online remote learning. Both faculties and institutions, however, were more comfortable sticking to what they knew, and transitioning to digital means was done slowly and sporadically. Now, faculty members had to learn to use the technology at light-speed and once this crisis is over, there will not be a single person in academia that does not know how to run a class on Zoom Video Communications Inc.’s platform.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem went from 30 to 3,000 online courses in a week, President Asher Cohen told Calclaist. Other institutions, including Technion Israel Institute of Technology and the Open University of Israel, report having shifted almost all of their courses to remote digital instruction.

Oren Soffer, dean of development and learning technology at the Open University, told Calcalist he believes this is a turning point for academia. Yaffa Zilbershats, head of Israel’s Council for Higher Education’s planning and budget committee agreed, saying the crisis will bring about the digital revolution way quicker than expected.

It remains difficult to foresee the exact details of this revolution but it is clear that even long after the crisis has passed there will be more classes recorded and published online for students than there were before. Even those lecturers who objected to digital teaching will now be more prone to allow their classes to be filmed, Hossam Hayek, dean of bachelor’s degree studies at Technion, told Calcalist.

One possible change brought about by the digitalization of academic studies is that students will be required to watch a recording of a lesson in advance and arrive in class for in-depth discussions and questions. Soffer’s vision goes even further, to create a Wikipedia-like collaborative online environment in which students can collaborate and answer questions together.

Another issue that can be advanced through online classes is the integration of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish minority. As classes held with a mixed-gendered audience are considered by many to be against Haredi religious code, eliminating the need to be physically present may encourage more people from this group to take part in academia.

With a lot of the previously frontal classes turning digital, universities could convert the extra space on campus to create a supportive environment for entrepreneurship and innovation, for example by establishing startup accelerators, Zilbershats said. Zilbershats also believes online classes could help different institutions collaborate, especially in fields that are suffering from a shortage of faculty staff, such as natural science.

Remote learning can also make academic studies more accessible to people living far away from the physical institutions and could make them cheaper, University of Haifa President Ron Robin said. Robin, however, believes that it is impossible to turn all academic degrees completely digital. “Creativity is ignited when people look each other in the eye and brainstorm,” he said.

Despite his background in tech, Ami Moyal, president of the Afeka Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering, feels the same way. “We have no choice but to be online right now, but this cannot be a long term solution for engineering,” Moyal said. Engineering classes are extremely difficult and require a direct link between students and lecturers as well as interpersonal skills like collaboration and presentation, he explained.

One of the main concerns with going digital was that seven universities and 30 colleges did so at the same time, which could have caused the internet or the video platforms to collapse, Robin said. Most issues, however, were isolated, for example, a lecturer whose home internet connection was too weak to sustain the broadcast, he said.

More pressing than technical hurdles, however, are the students’ difficulty in concentrating for long hours of study in front of a screen at home, without the comradery they get with frontal classes. Even though attendance is high—amounting to hundreds of students in mandatory classes, according to Robin—due to people being confined to their homes on government orders, attention deficit appears to be an even bigger issue with remote classes. “Students run errands, we have even seen them mopping the floors during class,” Moyal said.

Of course, not everything can be done online. It seems the only thing academic institutes can do about lab experiments in electronics or chemistry right now is hope the lockdown regulations will loosen before the semester ends.

In bid to protect medical staff during coronavirus outbreak, Galilee Medical Center pilots a facemask sticker to catch and kill virus nanoparticles.

Article published at www.jisrael21c.org on April 02, 2020.

Dr. Samer Srouji, left, and members of his oral & maxillofacial surgery team at Galilee Medical Center testing the Maya sticker on their surgical masks. Photo by Eli Cohen

Israel’s Galilee Medical Center is piloting a virus-neutralizing sticker that attaches to surgical masks to better protect medical staff during the corona crisis.

The 3D-printed “Maya” sticker was developed at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology by a mechanical engineering team led by Prof. Eyal Zussman. The sticker contains nanofibers that capture nanoparticles, and disinfectants believed capable of killing any viruses in those nanoparticles.

he Technion team worked in coordination with Prof. Samer Srouji, director of the medical center’s Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Department and Oral Medicine & Dentistry Institute; and in collaboration with the Directorate of Defense Research and Development of Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

Israel’s Ministry of Health has given initial approval for the 723-bed government-owned hospital to trial the unique sticker.

“This is a fast and available solution, using advanced technologies. We are excited to launch a pilot at the medical center to test adaptation of the sticker by the medical staff,” said Srouji.

Dr. Masad Barhoum, general director of the Galilee Medical Center, said that if the Maya sticker meets expectations in protecting healthcare professionals against infection, the medical center will recommend it to other hospitals in Israel and abroad.

Deputy Director General Dr. Tsvi Sheleg tells ISRAEL21c that the hospital also devised a special transparent PVC box that better protects anesthesiologists when they intubate COVID-19 patients.

“We have a prototype and are building 100 of them. Once it is in medical use we will advise it to other hospitals because I think it is a crucial low-tech application that can help physicians.”

Kira Radinsky’s Diagnostic Robotics has developed an AI-based platform to predict the spread of COVID-19 and triage patient

Article published at www.jewishinsider.com on April 01, 2020.

But Dr. Kira Radinsky, 33, is at the forefront of Israel’s battle against the novel coronavirus. And she’s hoping to share her new technology with the rest of the world as it fights the global pandemic.
Radinsky, the co-founder of digital health startup Diagnostic Robotics, has been working day and night to put the finishing touches on a digital platform that is a one-stop shop for managing the disease. Already this week, the company’s COVID360 platform is beginning to roll out in Israel, billed as an “end-to-end centralized solution for corona treatment.”

Diagnostic Robotics, co-founded in 2017 by Radinsky, Yonatan Amir and Moshe Shoham, has been working since its founding to produce a data-driven prediction platform to aid hospitals and medical clinics in their efforts to improve patient care.

But earlier this year, Amir realized the company needed to shift full time to helping tackle the growing global — and local — threat of coronavirus, Radinsky said.

“A month ago, we decided we want to convert our system to help Israel fight COVID,” Radinsky told Jewish Insider during a phone interview on Tuesday. Until recently, the company had been working on “triage systems driven by artificial intelligence to reduce healthcare loads,” targeted at always-overcrowded emergency rooms. They were just about to release the system, “and then COVID happened. And we decided that we’re going to convert the system to doing COVID triage.”

The new COVID360 platform starts at home — on smartphones to be exact — helping to both reduce the overload on the medical system and cut the risk of further spreading the infection. Rolled out in partnership with the Health Ministry and the four Israeli health care providers, the remote assessment tool is slated to reach every citizen of Israel.

“The way it works today, is there’s a text message being sent to all people with a questionnaire,” Radinsky said. Based on the information gathered about symptoms, daily interactions and location, “we create an epidemiological map for the decision makers.” That map helps the software “predict — using machine learning — how the disease is going to spread and in which areas.”

Members of the Clalit HMO in Israel received their first survey on Monday, and patients enrolled in the other three HMOs will be added to the system in the coming days. In addition to the predictive map, the platform works to triage patients remotely in real time.

“In parallel, we’re working on an authenticated triage system,” Radinsky told JI. “So if we know if somebody is specifically sick, or starting to develop COVID symptoms, we would contact the providers — of course with [the patient’s] approval.” On Monday, the first day of the rollout — with only Clalit members taking part — “we identified 200 people with COVID symptoms — and that less than a third of them were in isolation. In one day — this is crazy.”

The system is hindered somewhat by the fact that much of the ultra-Orthodox population in Israel — where the outbreak has been severe after some in the community were resistant to isolation restrictions — are not reachable via smartphone. But they are still working to overcome that.
“In certain areas, we often text them and then call them,” Radinsky explained. That way the questionnaire can be completed over the phone for those at high risk, which will aid in care management, but not in the epidemiological mapping. Overall, she said, 80% of those sent the survey complete it: “These are amazing numbers.”

An additional benefit of the remote triage platform is that it enables doctors in quarantine to continue working and assessing patients. As of Tuesday morning, the Health Ministry confirmed that 3,489 medical workers — including 758 doctors — in the country are in mandatory quarantine after exposure to a coronavirus patient. “The idea is to be able to triage the patient for coverage without any touch.”

Radinsky said Diagnostic Robotics has been approached by several countries interested in utilizing the platform in their own fight against COVID-19. Outside of Israel, Salesforce and Deloitte are working to distribute the technology as widely as possible.

“So many countries have approached us about giving access to the system,” she said. “It’s really important for me to convey that Israel is reaching out to additional countries offering our help. If anybody needs help, and our system can be helpful for them, we will be helping them.”

The platform is web-based and already available in multiple languages, and ready to be distributed as widely as possible. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted that the platform is free and ready to distribute to those in need.

“People in New York, the Jewish community there: We have the technology, we’re willing to give it to you,” Radinsky said. “We will not charge for the software. If you want to reach out to us, we’re here to help.”

Kira Radinsky

The epidemiological map and predictive AI tool is based on not just locally gathered information, but also the trajectory of the disease in other countries.

“We have all the information coming from South Korea, Italy and Israel,” Radinsky said. “So using AI, we can see how the disease progresses for different people and identify COVID symptoms very early on.”
The map that the system generates, she said, is the most powerful tool the platform has to offer.

“Based on [the map], people can build better decision making and understand how it’s going to spread,” Radinsky explained. “So if there are certain areas that need more isolation, and if certain areas need more masks or more tests, this is the only way of making such decisions.”

Predictions — in particular of medical events — have long been Radinsky’s passion and focus. The Ukrainian-born scientist, who made aliya at age 4, has been racking up accomplishments and achievements from a very young age. She enrolled in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology at just age 15 — later taking a break for her mandatory army service — where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s in computer science and a PhD in machine learning and artificial intelligence, all before age 26.

Shortly after completing her education, she founded the customer sales prediction start-up SalesPredict, which she sold three years later to eBay for a reported $40 million. After several years as the director of data science for eBay, Radinsky resigned late last year to work full time as the chair and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics.

It was during an internship at Microsoft headquarters in Washington state that Radinsky co-developed a platform that successfully predicted the first outbreak of cholera in Cuba in 130 years. The software mined data and news reports and drew conclusions based on correlations between floods, droughts and outbreaks.

So did Radinsky see this global pandemic coming?

“Unlike the previous pandemics — or epidemics — our system was able to predict it… this one is a new one and there was no pattern identifying it,” Radinsky explained to JI. “Once it started in China and spread to additional locations in Europe, it was clear it would reach Israel, the United States and other locations.”

Based on initial data, Radinsky said, the trajectory of the disease in Israel “is correlated with what’s happening in Wuhan,” the site of the original outbreak in China. But that prediction is still based on speculation since “there just isn’t enough data” to know if the outbreak will last several months or two years.

But the Israeli medical system is handling things well, she said, pointing to the low rate of deaths from the virus in the country — aided strongly by its early isolation efforts.

“Taking the steps for isolation very early on helped a lot,” she said, drawing a distinction with places like New York, where more than a hundred people are dying of the virus every day. “There was no other intervention that helped as much… every day that you wait it goes out of control.”

Staff members are at the forefront of medical technologies and innovation, task forces, methods and vaccines in the making, working to protect the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Article published at www.thejewishvoice.com on April 01, 2020.

Researchers on the COVID-19 response effort at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, from left: Professor Angel Porgador, deputy vice president for research and development; Dr. Roi Gazit; and Avishay Edrir, March 2020. Photo Credit: Dani Machlis/BGU.

Israeli universities and institutes—and their affiliated academics, researchers, doctors, scientists and students—are leading the fight against the coronavirus. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Technion‒Israel Institute of Technology, Rambam Health Care Campus, Migal Galilee Research Institute and the Sheba Medical Center are each at the forefront of medical technologies and innovation, task forces, methods and vaccines in the making that are working to protect the spread of the COVID-19 virus that has become a global pandemic over the last few months.

A researcher at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa on Feb. 19, 2019. Photo: Hadas Parush/Flash90.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Beersheva)

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s president Professor Daniel Chamovitz recently announced a task force to “harness the university’s vast brain power, research skills and ingenuity to help cope with the coronavirus pandemic,” maintaining that it is “our moral obligation to contribute to coping with this pandemic.”

In a meeting attended by 50 scientists from diverse departments within the university, ideas were presented and the task force broke into several groups working on the most promising projects and collaborations, including self-sterilizing facemasks, medical emergency drones, a coronavirus test that could take just five minutes using chip technology, and a telemedicine and remote triage system.

“BGU is working to be the leading university in Israel in providing a comprehensive multidisciplinary coronavirus response effort,” said Doug Seserman, CEO of the American Associates of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Professor Nadav Davidovitch, director of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, shared his optimism with JNS that “this is not Armageddon, and these situations can lead to innovation.”

“Since we have national health insurance, we have excellent electronic records and integration between clinic and community,” he added.

“Israel has been preparing for this kind of event for at least two decades with the establishment of an epidemiological response and intervention team,” said Davidovitch. “We have a very strong system for lab testing, a strong surveillance system for influenza outbreaks and a strong public health system well-trained to do epidemiological investigations.”

View of the Haifa Bay from the campus of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in the Israeli city of Haifa, Feb. 19, 2019. Photo by Hadas Parush/Flash90.

Technion‒Israel Institute of Technology and Rambam Health Care Campus (Haifa)

Researchers at Israel’s Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and Rambam Health Care Campus have successfully tested a new method called “pooling,” which they claim will dramatically increase the country’s ability to test for COVID-19 efficiently.

Enabling simultaneous testing of dozens of samples, according to the researchers, the method will greatly accelerate the rate of COVID-19 testing and detection. Only in rare cases where the joint sample is found to be positive will individual test be needed for each of the specific samples.

Applying the test when the frequency of infection in the population is low, Idan Yelin, a researcher in the Technion Faculty of Biology, told JNS, will “allow for identifying infection cases very early on, before an outbreak is apparent.”

“The great thing about this method is that it can be used immediately,” he said, as “it uses the same equipment and kits that are being used routinely, while conserving scarce reagents.”

“Many people throughout the world found our method interesting and have contacted us,” added Yelin.

“As far as we know, this method is not currently being used anywhere [else],” he further maintained, noting that “the idea itself is not new; it is just that a proof of concept was lacking.”

“We showed that it works for this virus with the commonly used test and believe that implementing it can be extremely useful in the months to come for pandemic surveillance,” he continued, “both for identifying the scope of infection in the wide community and for routine monitoring of populations at risk.”

A view of a laboratory at the Migal Galilee Research Institute. A newly developed Israeli vaccine for coronavirus will likely be ready for testing in less than 10 weeks, said Migal’s CEO David Zigdon.

Migal Galilee Research Institute (Kiryat Shmona, Israel)

A newly developed Israeli vaccine for coronavirus will likely be ready for testing in less than 10 weeks, said Migal Galilee Research Institute’s CEO David Zigdon.

Funded by the Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology and in cooperation with Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture, the research institute has been working for four years towards a vaccine that can be adapted for various viruses, which is now being focused to create a vaccine against COVID-19, the human strain of coronavirus.

According to the institute, this possibility was identified as a byproduct of Migal’s development of a vaccine against IBV (Infectious Bronchitis Virus), a disease affecting poultry. Now, Migal has made required genetic adjustments to adapt the vaccine to COVID-19, and is working to achieve the safety approvals that will enable in-vivo testing.

According to Zigon, the institute’s goal is to produce the vaccine during the next seven to nine weeks, and to achieve safety approval in another few weeks.

“This will be an oral vaccine, making it particularly accessible to the general public,” he said in a press release. “We are currently in intensive discussions with potential partners that can help accelerate the in-human trials phase and expedite the completion final product development and regulatory activities.”

Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer (Ramat Gan)

Rated among the 10 best hospitals in the world in 2020 by Newsweek, experts at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center are currently on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic with doctors who have innovated telemedicine in treating the virus, while protecting medical staff and setting the standard of care for telemedicine during this time.

“Sheba Medical Center has emerged as a global leader when it comes to telemedicine in the fight against this pandemic,” Dr. Galia Barkai, head of telemedicine at Sheba Medical Center, told JNS.

Barkai laid out the three main ways Sheba is using telemedicine to treat and save patients, while protecting vital health-care workers. First, the facility is “transitioning standard services, such as outpatient care, to virtual visits.”

Secondly, Sheba is using telemedicine to support isolated coronavirus patients in a special facility. “We have created a new standard that has now become a national standard in Israel,” she said. “We do this via telemedicine kits containing innovative technology patients can use at home, which report to doctors in real time.”

The third, she continued, is for critically ill patients. “We designed our new dedicated COVID-19 Critical Care ICU so that nurses and physicians can treat the patient continuously at a safe distance, using various methods such as AI [artificial intelligence] to predict patient deterioration, robotics and even a minicar that allow them to get close to the patients.”

“It was only possible to implement these new services so quickly at Sheba because we have been working on advanced telemedicine capabilities for years,” said Barkai. “This allowed us to scale quickly at the moment of crisis.”

While it’s not “brand-new technology” Sheba is inventing, explained Barkai, the medical center excels at leveraging existing technology and embedding it in their workflow, setting a new standard of care for hospitals and medical centers around the world.

Researcher Avi Schroeder’s technology for shellfish could protect us against coronavirus. He’s also working on a cancer drug from an elephant protein.

Can an antiviral food additive for farmed shrimp be adapted for protecting humans against coronavirus?

Very possibly, says the technology’s developer, Israeli scientist and serial entrepreneur Avi Schroeder.

Article published at www.israel21c.org on March 25, 2020.

Technion personalized medicine researcher Dr. Avi Schroeder invented a technology to protect shrimp from a deadly virus. Photo courtesy of the Technion

The coronavirus crisis has concerned him from the start. In January, he helped organize a delivery of 10,000 protective facemasks on the last flight to China from Ben-Gurion International Airport. On March 15, he agreed to advise the Israel Defense Forces’ Home Front Command on dealing with the epidemic in Israel.

Schroeder explains that five years ago, his lab invented a technology that boosts the immune system of animals against viral diseases.

The invention was spun off into a Haifa-based startup, ViAqua Therapeutics. With Schroeder as scientific adviser, ViAqua decided to focus on shrimp, an important aquaculture product in many countries. A viral infection called white spot syndrome is wiping out nearly 30 percent of the shrimp population globally every year.

“The feed proved extremely effective in trials against the virus conducted in Thailand, USA and Europe,” Schroeder tells ISRAEL21c.Regulatory approval is expected this year in 11 countries.

Schroeder believes the same antiviral technology could be adapted for humans.

“The gap is not great. We understand how the virus works and where we can attack it to stop its progression inside the body,” he explains.

Research partnerships could push this approach forward as the pandemic continues.

Elephants never forget, or get cancer

ViAqua Therapeutics is one of four biotech startups in which Schroeder is involved. It’s not the only one with an animal connection.

While ViAqua focuses on how humans can protect shrimp against viral diseases, Peel Therapeutics focuses on how elephants can protect humans against cancer.

We all know the adage that elephants never forget. What is more astonishing is that elephants never get cancer.

Schroeder heard this fact in 2015 from Dr. Joshua Schiffman, a Salt Lake City pediatric hematologist-oncologist speaking at a local medical conference.

Eager to find out more, Schroeder invited Schiffman to dinner in Haifa that evening.

“Elephants’ body mass is 100 times greater than ours and they have a similar lifespan. If they don’t get cancer even though they have 100 times more cells than we do, something is protecting them that we lack,” Schroeder learned from Schiffman.

And Schiffman learned that Schroeder develops nanotechnologies to deliver cancer meds precisely to tumor sites.

The conversation led the two scientists to cofound Peel Therapeutics (“peel” is Hebrew for “elephant”).

The company, jointly held by the Technion and the University of Utah, discovered which protein protects elephants from cancer: P53.

“Humans have two copies of P53, and elephants have 40 copies of P53,” Schroeder tells ISRAEL21c. “One of the elephant copies is a super-acting P53. I thought we could use nanotechnology to deliver this elephant protein to humans as a medication.”

In Petri dishes, synthetic elephant P53 effectively killed cells from 15 types of human cancers. “It is unbelievable to see how the cancer cells explode,” says Schroeder. Preclinical trials are proceeding.

Moebius Medical

Schroeder’s first enterprise was a Hebrew University spinoff, Moebius Medical, based in Tel Aviv.

The license for the company’s injectable medication to treat severe osteoarthritis is now owned by Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, one of the world’s 10 largest specialty and generic medicine makers.

Advanced clinical trials are planned this year in the United States and Europe.

“It was one of the greatest moments of my life when I heard the results of the first clinical trial,” says Schroeder. “A single injection lubricates the knee with a new medicinal compound and lets patients regain daily function with almost no pain medication, which is amazing.”

The effect is immediate and lasts about 90 days. Pending further trials, Schroeder hopes to see the Moebius medication on the market around 2022.

Barcode Diagnostics

Barcode Diagnostics aims to help oncologists choose the best treatment for each cancer patient.

“Not knowing which medication to give is one of the greatest challenges physicians face daily,” says Schroeder.

“It’s assumed in breast cancer that about one-third of patients receive medication they don’t respond to. And that type of cancer has the greatest arsenal of research and treatment options. So we wondered: Could we improve the personalized medicine process?”

They invented a technology that works like an allergy test inside the patient’s tumor.

Nanoparticles containing minuscule doses of different medications — each the size of 1/1000 width of a hair – are introduced into the tumor. They’re tracked using a unique barcoding system to determine within 48 hours which is most effective.

“We had a lot of moments of almost giving up because it was so hard,” says Schroeder, “but an amazing team of students and researchers got it to work.”

Backed by the NGT3 (Next Generation Technology) venture fund in Nazareth, Barcode Diagnostics is starting human clinical trials this year in Israel.

Schroeder expects a fast regulatory path because the technology fills an unmet need in cancer treatment.

Technion researcher Dr. Avi Schroeder is advising the Home Front Command on dealing with coronavirus. Photo courtesy of the Technion

Tikkun olam

Schroeder was raised with four siblings in a Jerusalem family steeped in science, medicine and the Jewish value of tikkun olam, repairing the world.

His father, physicist and lecturer Gerald Schroeder, has written such books as The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom. His mother, Barbara Sofer, is an award-winning author as well as Israeli director of public relations for Hadassah.

Ever since completing graduate studies in chemical engineering at Ben-Gurion and Hebrew universities and a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012, Schroeder has looked for innovations that “you can invent in a lab and really change people’s lives.”

In addition to his lab and the four startups, and now advising the Home Front Command, Schroeder teaches chemical engineering and nanobiotechnology at the Technion. And he is raising five children with his educator wife, Hadas.

With only 24 hours in a day, how does he do it all?

“I surround myself with great people. I learned that when you grow teams of great people around you, you can do great things and be more meaningful with your time,” Schroeder tells ISRAEL21c.

“Good science has to be connected to the real world, so in addition to scientists we also need people who understand the medical reality and the business around the science — how the product should look, which patients would benefit most, and how to navigate the regulatory space.”

Schroeder’s lab is “a great place to invent disruptive technologies,” he says. “Companies come in to talk to our students; we have WhatsApp groups with the CEOs. I’m excited about all our products and I believe they all can make a big difference.”

The National Emergency Team of the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D) in the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMoD) has adapted two systems developed by defense industries Elbit and IAI, to measure the vital signs of patients.

The data, including pulse, respiratory rate and temperature, are measured remotely using a combination of radar and electro-optical sensors, thus reducing the risk of infection to medical personnel. The next stage of development: screening and prioritizing patient care based on the analysis of vital data.

Article published at i-hls.com on March 31, 2020.

The National Emergency Team led by the Director of the DDR&D, Brig. Gen. (Res.), Dr. Dani Gold, continues to identify and develop advanced technological solutions to help fight the spread of the COVID-19 virus. In recent days, the team has successfully completed a test in which two systems were adapted to measure the vital data of patients, remotely.

The systems, developed by Elbit Systems and Elta, a subsidiary of IAI, use an array of radar and electro-optical sensors. The team has two medical advisors, Dr. Yossi Shaya and Dr. Akiva Esterson of the Beilinson – Rabin Medical Center.

The vital signs measured using the system will be displayed on a monitor for the physician to review. In addition, the data is displayed in a graphic user interface that facilitates decision-making processes. The system will enable medical staff to remain in a sterile environment, and limit contact with the patient, thereby significantly reducing the risk of infection.

The goal of the test was to determine the systems’ reliability and accessibility. As a result of the test, plans are underway for the implementation of these systems in medical centers. The test was conducted in collaboration with Elbit, Elta Petah Tikva, EchoCare Technologies, Vayyar, Neteera, Rabin Medical Center (Beilinson and Sharon Hospitals), the Directorate of Research and Development in the DDR&D, led by Brig. Gen. Yaniv Rotem, Dr. Yoni Savir of the Technion and additional research groups from the academic community and the IDF.

Col. A, DDR&D in the Ministry of Defense: “The combination of the technological capabilities of the defense industries and the extraordinary capabilities of the officers in the DDR&D, enables us to adapt systems developed for security purposes, to fulfill medical needs in light of the coronavirus. The system that we have adapted is based on radar and thermal cameras and can measure patients’ vital signs remotely.”

Researchers at Technion announced a successful trial of a method of pooling medical samples and performing simultaneous testing for the presence of the virus on 32 or 64 samples at a time

If you like puzzles you have probably encountered one of the ones that involve a single counterfeit coin hidden among a larger number of real ones. Normally, in these problems, you have to separate the fake coin, which has a different weight from the real ones, by using a balance scale. But you are only allowed to use the scale a small number of times, perhaps two or three.

Classic simple example: you’re given nine coins and promised that the lone counterfeit is lighter than the others. Can you single it out for disposal, or for passing off onto an unsuspecting cashier, using the balance only twice? You can (and I’ll give you this chance to cover up or scroll away from the answer if you want to try figuring it out yourself).

In your first test, you put three coins in each pan of the balance, leaving three aside. If one pan is lighter than the other, the coin has to be in that group of three; if they are equal the coin is obviously in the group of three left off to the side. Having isolated a three-coin group, you use the same logic to pick out the counterfeit. Pick any two coins and put one in each pan: if one is lighter, that’s the fake. If they’re equal, the fake must be the third one.

Article published at https://nationalpost.com on March 30, 2020.

Medical personnel test a person for the coronavirus at Erasme Hospital in Brussels on March 30.

One of the interesting, and possibly significant, sidelights on the war against the new coronavirus involves multiplicative logic of a similar kind. On March 18, infectious disease researchers at Technion, Israel’s oldest university, announced a successful trial, completed in less than a week, of a method of pooling medical samples and performing simultaneous polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for the presence of the virus on 32 or 64 samples at a time. That is, you get a very fast “positive” or “negative” answer for the whole group immediately, and can proceed with tests of individuals (without necessarily taking new samples) in the case of a group positive. If the pooled test is negative, everybody’s off the hook.

There does not seem to be a paper describing the trial yet, but the scientists involved are of high repute, and the press release got other statisticians and researchers talking about the idea. (There is a mathematical preprint on the arXiv open publishing site discussing the “efficiency gains” from pooled testing in various scenarios.)

The whole world is in a situation like the chap in the coin puzzle: we have limited access to tests that we would ideally perform on everybody alive, individually and at once. Everybody is working, with visible but frustratingly belated success, on expanding the number of individual tests than can be done per day. Pooled tests could be part of a strategy for traditional epidemiological surveillance. If you have a group of asymptomatic people — maybe it is a group of special communal concern, like the staff of a care facility or a grocery store — you could do the pooled test first. If you get a negative you are spared the series of tests on individuals. I know everyone has had their fill of herd metaphors, but pooled PCR has been used as a cost- and time-saver for decades on livestock, in just this way.

A staff member wearing a protective face mask and gloves takes a swab from a man at a drive-thru coronavirus screening centre in Abu Dhabi on March 30.

But pooled tests may also be useful for sampling large populations and for quantifying the presence of the virus in them. The number of asymptomatic cases in the general population is a parameter of considerable concern now, and it will go on being important after we control today’s disastrous outbreaks in virus-naive populations. Pooled-sample PCR has a history of being used in this way, too, in checking for seasonal changes in the spread of low-grade infectious diseases, including other coronaviruses.

Probably every virologist knew a technique like this was possible, and if they had been given unlimited budgets and power in advance of the crisis, they probably would have cooked up plans for including pooling in a fast-response strategy for a pandemic of novel disease. It is the sort of thing experts will go on talking about long after the rest of us have returned to our lives and pushed aside our careers of couch-potato epidemiology and economics.

Pooling samples for testing is not useful in every conceivable situation. Once a large fraction of the population has a virus, the efficiency gains from pooling evaporate, and if the tightest technical bottleneck in your testing capacity is the number of nasopharyngeal swabs available, or the number of test personnel available to wield them, pooling won’t help. I suspect that pooling might stay on the agenda because we seem likely to end up in a situation, or a world of local situations, in which a first wave of infection has been suppressed but most of the population is still naive to the virus.

Staff members are at the forefront of medical technologies and innovation, task forces, methods and vaccines in the making, working to protect the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Israeli universities and institutes and their affiliated academics, researchers, doctors, scientists and students are leading the fight against the coronavirus.
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Technion‒Israel Institute of Technology, Rambam Health Care Campus, Migal Galilee Research Institute and the Sheba Medical Center are each at the forefront of medical technologies and innovation, task forces, methods and vaccines in the making that are working to protect the spread of the COVID-19 virus that has become a global pandemic over the last few months.

Article published at www.israelhayom.com/ on March 28, 2020.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s president Professor Daniel Chamovitz recently announced a task force to “harness the university’s vast brainpower, research skills and ingenuity to help cope with the coronavirus pandemic,” maintaining that it is “our moral obligation to contribute to coping with this pandemic.”

In a meeting attended by 50 scientists from diverse departments within the university, ideas were presented and the task force broke into several groups working on the most promising projects and collaborations, including self-sterilizing face masks, medical emergency drones, a coronavirus test that could take just five minutes using chip technology, and a telemedicine and remote triage system.

“BGU is working to be the leading university in Israel in providing a comprehensive multidisciplinary coronavirus response effort,” said Doug Seserman, CEO of the American Associates of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Professor Nadav Davidovitch, director of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, shared his optimism with JNS that “this is not Armageddon, and these situations can lead to innovation.”

“Since we have national health insurance, we have excellent electronic records and integration between clinic and community,” he added.

“Israel has been preparing for this kind of event for at least two decades with the establishment of an epidemiological response and intervention team,” said Davidovitch. “We have a very strong system for lab testing, a strong surveillance system for influenza outbreaks and a strong public health system well-trained to do epidemiological investigations.”

The Technion

Researchers at Israel’s Technion and Rambam Health Care Campus have successfully tested a new method called “pooling,” which they claim will dramatically increase the country’s ability to test for COVID-19 efficiently.

Enabling simultaneous testing of dozens of samples, according to the researchers, the method will greatly accelerate the rate of COVID-19 testing and detection. Only in rare cases where the joint sample is found to be positive will an individual test be needed for each of the specific samples.

Applying the test when the frequency of infection in the population is low, Idan Yelin, a researcher in the Technion Faculty of Biology, told JNS, will “allow for identifying infection cases very early on, before an outbreak is apparent.”

“The great thing about this method is that it can be used immediately,” he said, as “it uses the same equipment and kits that are being used routinely while conserving scarce reagents.”

“Many people throughout the world found our method interesting and have contacted us,” added Yelin.

“As far as we know, this method is not currently being used anywhere [else],” he further maintained, noting that “the idea itself is not new; it is just that a proof of concept was lacking.”

“We showed that it works for this virus with the commonly used test and believe that implementing it can be extremely useful in the months to come for pandemic surveillance,” he continued, “both for identifying the scope of infection in the wide community and for routine monitoring of populations at risk.”

A newly developed Israeli vaccine for coronavirus will likely be ready for testing in less than 10 weeks, said Migal Galilee Research Institute’s CEO David Zigdon.

Funded by Israel’s Science and Technology Ministry and in cooperation with the Agriculture Ministry the research institute has been working for four years towards a vaccine that can be adapted for various viruses, which is now being focused to create a vaccine against COVID-19, the human strain of coronavirus.

According to the institute, this possibility was identified as a byproduct of Migal’s development of a vaccine against IBV (Infectious Bronchitis Virus), a disease affecting poultry. Now, Migal has made required genetic adjustments to adapt the vaccine to COVID-19, and is working to achieve the safety approvals that will enable in-vivo testing.

According to Zigon, the institute’s goal is to produce the vaccine during the next seven to nine weeks and to achieve safety approval in another few weeks.

“This will be an oral vaccine, making it particularly accessible to the general public,” he said in a press release. “We are currently in intensive discussions with potential partners that can help accelerate the in-human trials phase and expedite the completion of final product development and regulatory activities.”

Medical personnel at the coronavirus ward being prepared at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, in central Israel

Rated among the 10 best hospitals in the world in 2020 by Newsweek, experts at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center are currently on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic with doctors who have innovated telemedicine in treating the virus while protecting medical staff and setting the standard of care for telemedicine during this time.

“Sheba Medical Center has emerged as a global leader when it comes to telemedicine in the fight against this pandemic,” Dr. Galia Barkai, head of telemedicine at Sheba Medical Center, told JNS.

Barkai laid out the three main ways Sheba is using telemedicine to treat and save patients, while protecting vital health-care workers. First, the facility is “transitioning standard services, such as outpatient care, to virtual visits.”

Secondly, Sheba is using telemedicine to support isolated coronavirus patients in a special facility. “We have created a new standard that has now become a national standard in Israel,” she said. “We do this via telemedicine kits containing innovative technology patients can use at home, which reports to doctors in real-time.”

The third, she continued, is for critically ill patients. “We designed our new dedicated COVID-19 Critical Care ICU so that nurses and physicians can treat the patient continuously at a safe distance, using various methods such as AI [artificial intelligence] to predict patient deterioration, robotics and even a mini-car that allow them to get close to the patients.”

“It was only possible to implement these new services so quickly at Sheba because we have been working on advanced telemedicine capabilities for years,” said Barkai. “This allowed us to scale quickly at the moment of crisis.”

While it’s not “brand-new technology” Sheba is inventing, explained Barkai, the medical center excels at leveraging existing technology and embedding it in their workflow, setting a new standard of care for hospitals and medical centers around the world.