US-based retail giant Walmart will be acquiring Zeekit, an Israeli startup that provides online clothing shoppers with a virtual fitting room where they can see what they would look like wearing an item before buying it.
The deal, of which the details were not disclosed, was announced by Walmart on May 13.
“I’m thrilled to announce Walmart’s plan to acquire Zeekit, a female-founded, Israeli-based company that combines fashion and technology through its dynamic virtual fitting room platform to create a significantly enhanced customer and social experience,” Walmart EVP of Apparel and Private Brands Denise Incandela said in press release.
She added Zeekit’s virtual try-on technology is a “game-changer” set to solve what has historically been one of the most difficult things to replicate online: understanding how an item will actually look on you.
Zeekit’s real-time image processing technology maps a shopper’s image into thousands of tiny segments. Various items of clothing are then processed in a similar manner and the two mappings are combined into a simulation incorporating factors such as body dimensions, fit, size and fabric.
Prior to the acquisition, Zeekit was already working with big-name brands such as Macy’s, Tommy Hilfiger, Asos and Adidas.
Walmart said that using Zeekit’s technology, customers will soon be able to try on items from its growing assortment of national brands including Free People, Champion and Levi’s Strauss, as well as of exclusive brands such as Time and Tru, Terra & Sky, Wonder Nation, and George.
Zeekit was founded in 2013 by CEO Yael Vizel, CTO Nir Appleboim and VP-R&D Alon Kristal. All three founders will continue to run Zeekit’s operations under Walmart.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Zeekit’s experienced team and three visionary founders … who bring extensive experience and impressive technology capabilities,” Incandela said in Walmart’s statement.
“We’re confident that with the team’s expertise in bringing real-time image technologies, computer vision and artificial intelligence to the world of fashion, we’ll identify even more ways to innovate for our customers in our continued effort to be the first-choice destination for fashion,” she added.
Former Israeli pilot, Eytan Stibbe will be taking 44 experiments in fields like agriculture, neurology and optics to space on next year’s mission to the International Space station.
Forty-four Israeli experiments are set to reach the International Space Station. Photo by Dima Zel via Shutterstock.com
Forty-four experiments conceived by Israeli scientists, entrepreneurs and students will be conducted in outer space by Eytan Stibbe, who is set to become the second Israeli to leave Earth’s orbit.
A former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot, Stibbe is scheduled to travel to the International Space Station as part of Axiom Space’s AX1 mission in 2022. It will be the first space mission to the ISS that will be manned entirely by private astronauts, and Stibbe is donating the $50 million cost of his trip and of the experiments that will be conducted.
Many of the 44 experiments will not be space related, but rather use the unique conditions found in space to test ideas and technologies from a variety of fields such as optics, agriculture and neurology.
They were announced on Wednesday at a conference held by the Israel Space Agency and the Ramon Foundation, which is named after Israel’s first astronaut Ilan Ramon and his family.
“Research in space is meant to break the boundaries of human knowledge, the attempts to resolve the unsolvable and decipher the unknown,” Stibbe said at the conference.
“What started out as a dream is taking shape before our eyes. The depths of a whole and fascinating world opened up before me, and every day I’m learning something new – thanks to you,” he told the crowd, which was made up of the entrepreneurs whose experiments he will be conducting.
From optics to hummus
According to the Ramon Foundation, the selected experiments will come from the fields of optics (1), engineering (1), energy (3), agriculture (3), medicine-neurology (3), communications (3), astrophysics (5), medicine-ophthalmology (7), medicine-medical devices (7) and medicine-biology (11). They come from a variety of sources, such as universities, startups, hospitals and schoolchildren.
The Sheba Medical Center, for example, will be sending multiple experiments into space. One of them will examine the effects of space conditions on the virulence of Salmonella enterica bacteria that causes foodborne disease, and specifically the impact of microgravity conditions on their growth.
Another is set to investigate anti-viral T cell activation and the production of a T-cell bio-bank for astronauts traveling to space, while a third will study the effects of microgravity on Alzheimer’s disease.
Eytan Stibbe is the second Israeli astronaut to launch into space. Seen here at a press conference in Tel Aviv on May 5, 2021. (Flash90)
In the field of energy, meanwhile, Israeli company StoreDot partnered with the Israel Electric Corporation to test fast charging technology for advanced ion-lithium batteries that could be utilized in electric vehicles. The zero-gravity conditions in space, the company says, will enable it to identify irregularities in the surface of the batteries’ anodes.
Hummus, too, is going to be represented in the mission, with SpaceIL co-founder and Standford PhD candidate Yonatan Winetraub sending off an experiment called “Space Hummus.”
Winetraub is collaborating with other scientists and teen students from southern Israel to grow chickpeas at the International Space Station using optogenetics, a genetic tool that controls plant growth. The point, they say, is that hummus is an easy-to-grow superfood, making it a strong candidate for outer-space agricultural efforts.
Other exciting experiments include one from the Oncology Department and Schneider’s Children Medical Center. Researchers there want to examine the influence of sub-gravity on malignant cells with or without chemotherapy.
The study will analyze the changes in gene expression and in the proliferation of malignant cells in instances of T-ALL leukemia in sub-gravity conditions to explore innovative ways to treat the cancer, which is very common in children, in a less toxic and more effective way.
Monitoring brain wellness
Also, EEG-Sense aims to monitor Eytan Stibbe’s brain activity for 10 minutes twice a day while he is on his mission using a multi-sensor headset that incorporates AI algorithms.
Data gathered from Stibbe could then be used to facilitate assessment of future astronauts’ cognitive wellness aboard their missions.
A joint Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and NASA experiment based on the physics of fluids under microgravity is also going to try show that liquids in space can successfully be shaped into optical elements of high quality.
If this works, it could enable the in-space manufacturing of optical elements such as space telescopes that will be able to capture direct imaging of extrasolar planets.
The experiments will take off with Stibbe to the ISS subject to approval by NASA and Axiom Space, the Israel Space Agency noted.
Scientists at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer have long understood that people with various autoimmune diseases often have elevated levels of a protein called CCR6, believed to play a part in a range of conditions from lupus to inflammatory bowel disease.
The Pfizer wizards have developed a compound that in lab tests seems to inhibit the protein, in theory preventing the symptoms and the harmful diseases.
But, as with all potential medicines, figuring out which conditions and which patients the drug could actually help outside the lab would be a long, expensive road of animal trials, human trials and data analysis.
That’s why Pfizer teamed up with Israeli startup CytoReason, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that builds digital models of the human immune system and diseases. Pfizer used those computer models and deep wells of data to quickly narrow down the drug’s possible uses, ultimately figuring out that it would work best to fight ulcerative colitis, a painful condition that affects the digestive system.
“The results we found in partnership with CytoReason supported Pfizer’s decision to begin the clinical development of this drug,” says Mike Vincent, chief scientific officer of Pfizer’s Inflammation and Immunology Research Unit.
Other pharmaceutical giants are also impressed. Six of the world’s 10 largest drugmakers, including GlaxoSmithKline and Roche, are among the multinationals now using CytoReason’s technology to develop hundreds of drugs.
On average, developing a new drug takes a decade and costs $2.6 billion. Less than 12 percent of new drugs actually succeed in gaining regulatory approval, according to data from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
CytoReason’s platform allows pharmaceutical developers to significantly accelerate their process, saving costs and potentially delivering more life-saving medications.
The future of drug development is likely to rely heavily on models and data from CytoReason and other computer-aided drug design companies, which could replace lengthy trials and lab work. Research Dive forecasts revenue in the fast-growing sector will grow 15.5 percent annually to reach $4.8 trillion a year by 2026.
CytoReason’s technology can replace some animal trials, allowing scientists to move directly from the lab to human trials. Pfizer was able to bypass tests on mice for its CCR6 research, saving about 18 months – and numerous mice. Someday, the company’s digital platform could be accepted as a more accurate and cost-effective substitute for today’s complex and expensive system of human clinical trials, says David Harel, CytoReason’s co-founder and CEO.
“We are building a digital, computational simulator of the human body that is so accurate it can be used to predict responses to drugs,” Harel says. “Scientists can then take a specific medicine and test it out. This lets scientists see directly how new compounds affect the human immune system. Our disease models do in less than an hour what would take a mouse experiment 18 months. And not only is it faster, it’s better, because the goal, after all, is to help humans, not mice.”
The system is especially timely as the costs of drug development rise, and as medicine becomes more complex and more tailored to individuals. The cost of developing new drugs is becoming so expensive that companies’ costs are beginning to outpace expected returns (see chart).
Returns on developing new drugs are being outpaced by rising costs. (EvaluatePharma via CytoReason)
“All the easy drugs have been discovered,” Harel says. “Now we are dealing with developing more complex drugs for more complex diseases.”
As scientists learn more about how each person’s unique makeup affects their response, the process becomes even more complicated, with the potential to tailor treatments to individual immune systems. Harel points to CAR-T cell therapy, which can spur a patient’s immune system to fight cancer, which, although often successful, is extremely expensive because the treatment is different for each patient.
“It’s so good that it’s almost science fiction,” he says. “But things like this, although amazing, make no financial sense to many companies. There are so many potential life-saving treatments to be discovered, but they are too expensive. That’s really not a good place for humanity to be in.”
Instead, to remain profitable, companies make “carpet bombs” that ultimately do not help everyone, and may even harm some patients, Harel says.
Incentives
While government regulations have long included incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for rare conditions, which the US Food and Drug Administration calls “orphan” diseases, these policies are no longer enough as it becomes clearer that different people respond differently.
“Every disease is now an orphan because we now know that every patient is different,” Harel says. “The more precise the medicine is, the better. But we are limited by economics. The whole way of developing drugs needs to change.”
CytoReason, whose technology was initially developed at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build computational models of diseases, is one of the companies leading such changes. It now provides these software-based models of the molecular makeup of diseases to clients, who can integrate them with other data, including studies and trial results, adding their own ideas for new medicines and digital models of those new chemical compounds.
CytoReason’s platform is based on a huge trove of published drug trials, and companies’ internal unpublished data that previously was kept hidden.
AI-powered algorithms quickly sort through and find patterns in the data, constantly improving with use, making the models more effective with time. Such models allow drug developers to alter certain aspects related to the immune system, and efficiently figure out how the same drug may affect different people, or how a certain disease or certain type of individual would respond to a potential compound or treatment.
“Once you have a model, you ask it an unlimited amount of questions, and it can answer those based on the data it’s built on,” Harel says, likening the process to navigating with a mobile app, like Waze, instead of a traditional printed map.
“Running a drug trial with animals like mice is sort of like trying to plan your trip on a paper map,” he says. “You don’t even know if the road is there.”
“We can already see technology and artificial intelligence speeding up and reducing costs of clinical trials,” Harel says. “But only in many years will human clinical trials be eliminated. Our goal is to help drugs get developed faster and cheaper, and to help deliver the best treatments to each patient, ultimately saving and improving lives.”
Innovation in NHS self-care will see patients in England swallow tiny cameras instead of having standard endoscopy.
Article published at The Guardian on March 11, 2021.
People will be able to check if they have bowel cancer by swallowing a tiny capsule containing miniature cameras, in an extension of patient self-care.
In what experts described as a trend towards more NHS at-home care, hastened by the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of people in England will be able to avoid the discomfort of having a camera inserted into their bowel by instead swallowing a capsule the size of a cod liver oil tablet.
Pictures transmitted from inside their body during the painless procedure will help doctors judge whether the person has bowel cancer, the second deadliest form of the disease in the UK.
The boss of the NHS in England said the procedure, known as a colon capsule endoscopy, is an example of “sci-fi” medicine increasingly deployed to improve care. One of the country’s top doctors said the capsules illustrated a major shift of healthcare out of hospitals that will see more and more diagnosis and treatment of illness done at home.
“As we come out of ‘peak Covid’ and the disruption of the pandemic, the NHS is now pushing ahead with genuine innovation to expand services for many other conditions. That’s why we’re now trialling these ingenious capsule cameras to allow more people to undergo cancer investigations quickly and safely,”
said Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England.
“What sounds like sci-fi is now becoming a reality, and as these minute cameras pass through your body, they take two pictures per second, checking for signs of cancer and other conditions like Crohn’s disease.”
NHS England’s trial of the capsules, which are 2cm long, follows its decision last month to send 31,000 women in London a home kit to test for signs of cervical cancer and overcome the awkwardness and discomfort some women feel at having a smear test for the human papilloma virus with a nurse or doctor.
Around 11,000 patients with potential symptoms of bowel cancer will be offered the option of swallowing a capsule as an alternative to having a standard endoscopy. The latter involves an invasive process in which a tiny camera mounted on a thin flexible wire is guided into someone’s body and then around their large bowel, where it takes pictures.
In contrast, colon capsule endoscopy involves the patient visiting a nurse who fits a belt and receiver around their waist under their clothing to capture the pictures, before taking the capsule, going home and using laxatives to clean out their bowel so that the cameras can get clear images.
The ‘PillCam’, shown for size reference next to a pen Photograph: NHS England/PA
The process takes five to eight hours. Photographs of the bowel are sent wirelessly from the capsule and later passed on to a cancer specialist to help them decide whether or not the person has bowel cancer, which kills about 16,600 people a year. Patients excrete the capsule when they go to the toilet.
The test is already being used across Scotland. The NHS there has found that most patients tested this way turn out to be cancer-free and do not experience any risks or complications with what they call the ScotCap Test, though the laxatives can leave some feeling sick and dehydrated.
Prof Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “The future of healthcare should be closer to the home, and indeed that is the vision of the NHS Long Term Plan [for the NHS in England]. As technologies develop, we will see more and more tests that can be done at home, which is great, provided they are accessible by all.
“Regarding colon capsules, we hope this will save some people from having to have a colonoscopy. But they will still need to have bowel preparation, which many say is the worst part of a colonoscopy, and come to hospitals or clinics to be given the capsule and monitoring equipment.”
Prof Peter Johnson, NHS England’s clinical director for cancer, said the latest initiative in at-home care showed the service was fast-tracking new ways of treating and diagnosing cancer. It responded to the suspension of much hospital-based cancer care during the pandemic by delivering chemotherapy drugs to thousands of patients who were unable to have radiotherapy.
“This is just one further example of the NHS embracing the latest innovative treatment options and bringing the NHS home to patients.”
Prof Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “We’re aware that some patients are reluctant to seek help for certain cancers because the diagnostic tests available can be invasive, so this is a fascinating development and we will be very interested to see the results of the trial.
“GPs are preparing for an upsurge in cases of suspected cancer cases post-Covid, and the capsule cameras and new test for cervical cancer are welcome developments that could enable more patients to monitor and manage their own health at home without embarrassment or discomfort.”
The endoscopy team at University College London Hospitals NHS trust is already using the capsules to detect bowel cancer.
Research by Professor Yuval Shaked of the Technion presents new ways to curb the development of anti-cancer therapy resistance, a phenomenon that is detrimental to the efficacy of existing cancer treatments. His research was recently summarized in a published article in Nature Reviews Cancer.
Anti-cancer therapy resistance: A devastating challenge
Although the initial cancer treatment phase is often successful, many patients become resistant to anti-cancer therapies, characterized by tumor relapse and/or spread. The majority of studies have so far focused on investigating the basis of resistance as a result of tumor-related changes.
But over the last decade, Prof. Shaked and his team have shown that the patient’s body plays a role, too. They have discovered that cancer therapy can induce local and systemic responses in the body, and these actually support the resurgence of cancer and its progression.
Predicting resistance
Prof. Shaked’s research focuses on predicting a patient’s response to anti-cancer therapy. This prevents disease recurrence or spread, improving patient care and outcomes.
Most of Prof. Shaked’s research has been around patient responses to chemotherapy, which harms not only cancer cells but also healthy cells in the body. But his recent research suggests that this reaction occurs in almost every existing anti-cancer therapy, including advanced therapies such as biological therapy. The host’s response to treatment involves the production of resources such as proteins and increased release of growth factors — processes that protect the tumor and allow it to flare up and metastasise.
Better, personalized treatments
Prof. Shaked emphasizes that his findings do not suggest that existing treatments are not effective. Rather, because each treatment triggers a response in a patient, it is important to match patients with the right treatments for their bodies.
For instance, only 20–30% of patients today respond to immunotherapy, one of the most important effective approaches currently in the field of cancer. Through blood testing, Prof. Shaked can predict the outcome of patients treated with immunotherapy and continue such treatment only in patients in whom treatment is expected to be effective.
Based on his findings, in the future physicians may offer combined therapies to increase the effectiveness of treatment or allow patients who are currently unresponsive to immunotherapy drugs to respond to them.
Bringing this research from the lab to the bedside
Prof. Shaked is working with ONCOHOST, a company he co-founded, to commercialize his research. ONCOHOST is currently conducting clinical trials in Israel that measure the host’s response to patient care and predict the effectiveness of the treatment. They are in negotiations to implement clinical trials in additional countries in Europe and the United States.
The company is also looking for ways to integrate different therapies to increase treatment effectiveness.
A research team led by Professors Ami Aronheim and Yuval Shaked of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion, with colleagues from Carmel Hospital, have found that early changes in the size, shape, or function of the heart caused by heart disease or injury, collectively known as cardiac remodeling, promotes cancer progression. The study, published in Circulation, demonstrates that catching and treating heart disease early on in cancer patients might help cardio-oncologists slow tumor progression and improve cancer outcomes.
“We recommend you treat heart problems early, when the body is still successfully coping with the problem, and not wait for a chronic condition,” said Prof. Aronheim. “Such problems can be detected with a simple echocardiography test, and in many cases, early catheterization may help to slow cancerous development.”
To mimic cardiac remodeling, the team exerted mechanical pressure on the heart of laboratory mice. The technique, known as transverse aortic constriction (TAC) stresses the mouse’s heart with a pressure overload resulting in an increase in heart cell growth that is common of cardiovascular complications in humans. The team then implanted cancer cells in the mice to see if the early cardiac changes affect tumor progression.
The researchers found the mice developed larger tumors at the site of the implanted cancer cells and demonstrated a higher rate of metastasis than the control group. The cells of the TAC-operated mice also displayed more of the tumor-promoting protein periostin. When researchers added purified periostin to test tube samples, the cancer cells multiplied, whereas reducing the protein lowered the cell proliferation.
The research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation, illustrating the importance of the Technion for Israel’s advancement in the basic sciences.
Metastasis, the spread of cancer cells from the primary tumor to new areas of the body, is responsible for an alarming 90% of cancer-related deaths. But knowing the risk of metastasis early on can help determine the most effective treatment and improve the patient’s outcome.
A research team led by Technion Professor Daphne Weihs of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering has developed and tested a biomechanical technology to predict whether a tumor is cancerous, and if so, the likelihood of spreading. The method involves seeding tumor-sampled cells on a special synthetic gel that mimics the physiological stiffness of soft tissue, and then observing the cells’ physical impact on the gel. Normal cells do not indent the gels, but invasive cells will forcefully push into the gel’s surface within one to two hours. Quantification of the number of indenting cells along with other measures provide the likelihood of metastasis. The technology was successfully tested on pancreatic tumor cells samples from volunteers at Rambam Health Care campus and on established breast and pancreatic cell lines used for research. The findings were published in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering.
Current methods to determine the risk of metastasis can take days or weeks of valuable time that some cancer patients do not have, but Prof. Weih’s technology helps determine the patient-specific treatment protocol just hours after an initial biopsy. Such swift assessment not only improves the patient’s survival rate but reduces the psychological stress brought on by long wait times.
Working to make their method widely available to patients, Prof. Weihs said, “The invasiveness of cells sampled from tissues is rapidly and quantitatively evaluated using our innovative mechanical invasive assay, which we are currently developing into a clinically applicable technology.”
Since the start of the pandemic, scientists have warned that cancer patients could be at increased risk of serious illness from COVID-19 due to a weakened immune system. But that commonly held belief, reinforced by an early study from China as well as the National Cancer Institute, might be wrong — for certain patients.
Article published at ats.org on September 16, 2020.
In fact, cancer patients, with the exception of those with blood cancers, may not become infected any more than the population at large, and might have the same if not better odds of beating back the most severe symptoms of COVID-19.
Those were the findings of a first-of-its-kind study by scientists at the Technion and Rambam Health Care Campus, who analyzed blood samples from 164 cancer patients undergoing active anti-cancer treatment and 107 healthy Rambam hospital workers to examine changes in the profile of the immune system. They found almost no difference in the rate of developing COVID-19 antibodies. In fact, the rate for the cancer patients was even a bit higher at 2.4% as compared to 1.94% for the healthcare workers. None of the subjects showed symptoms for the coronavirus.
“Our hypothesis is that the different response of cancer patients to the disease is related to the fact that the anti-cancer treatment changes the profile of the immune system,” said Technion Professor Yuval Shaked, head of the Technion Integrated Cancer Center in the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, who worked alongside Professor Irit Ben-Aharon, director of oncology at Rambam. Specifically, myeloid cells, which are vital to the immune system, are more severely damaged by the coronavirus in the general population than in cancer patients.
The team theorized that cancer treatments may limit the ability of the coronavirus to induce severe inflammation, protecting them from COVID’s life-threatening “cytokine storms,” in which the body’s immune system attacks its own cells rather than fighting off the virus.
The Technion-Rambam team cautioned that their study was small and called for further research. Nonetheless, they hope their work allows cancer patients to breathe easier, as many have delayed treatments to avoid hospitals.
When treating cancer, researchers are always searching for ways to remove cancer cells while minimizing damage to the rest of the body. One possible approach is to find processes unique to cancer cells, and which would allow specific targeting. If such a process can be disrupted, only those cells would be affected.
A process (or absence thereof) can be unique to some types of cancer, and not be present in others. In such a case, we would want a simple way to recognize whether a particular tumor possesses the unique trait or not. The implication of this question is whether the tumor would respond to this or that treatment, allowing us to match a treatment to the patient who is likely to be helped by it, rather than going by trial and error.
Professor Tomer Shlomi’s research group discovered just such a process – one that may be targeted in cancer cells without causing damage to healthy ones, findings that have been published in Cell Metabolism.
Prof. Shlomi is a member of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, the Faculty of Biology, the Lorry I. Lokey Center for Life Science and Engineering, and the Rappaport Technion Integrated Cancer Center.
The folate cycle is a process essential to DNA and RNA production. As a result, it is highly important to both cancer cells and healthy cells. Because DNA production is a critical stage in cell division, and thus in tumor growth, the folate cycle is a common target for chemotherapy. However, for the very same reason, there are significant side effects to attacking it.
Tomer Shlomi
Professor
There are, in fact, two folate cycles – one happening in the mitochondria (an organelle inside the cell), and one in the cytosol (the fluid that fills the cell). A healthy cell can switch from one to the other. A variety of tumor cells, Professor Shlomi’s group discovered, rely on the cytosolic pathway exclusively. The implication is, if treatment were to target the cytosolic folate cycle, healthy cells would switch to the mitochondrial cycle and would not be harmed, leaving tumor cells to die.
It remains to recognize whether a particular tumor is indeed one in which the mitochondrial folate cycle is non-functional, and here too Shlomi’s team provided. RFC is a transporter protein that regulates intracellular folate levels. Low RFC – low folate. Low folate, the group discovered, is devastating to the mitochondrial cycle. So low RFC tumors are the ones that would be affected by cytosolic cycle-blocking treatments.
Both the pathway that may be attacked, and the way to recognize which tumors the attack would be effective against have thus been found.
Technion scientists have developed a novel method for rapid and accurate sensing of coronavirus without the need to rely on PCR amplification, a technique that makes millions or even billions of copies of DNA so that there is enough material to test. The new technique can identify the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in a sample by counting and quantifying the virus’ RNA molecules with single-molecule precision. This method is not biased by PCR amplification errors, allowing researchers to develop a more accurate clinical diagnostic technique. Researchers have also found that the technique can be used to detect metastatic cancer.
The research was led by Professor Amit Meller and carried out by researchers Dr. Yana Rozevsky, Dr. Tal Gilboa, Dr. Xander van Kooten, and staff scientist Dr. Diana Huttner — all of whom are researchers in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering — and Professor Ulrike Stein and Dr. Dennis Kobelt from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and the Charité Hospital in Berlin.
Illustration of DNA molecules passing through a nanopore one after the other
RT-qPRC Testing
The most widely used test for COVID-19 is the RT-qPCR test. It requires first collecting a sample from a patient using a swab, “opening” the virus, and extracting RNA from it. In the next stage, called reverse transcription (RT), specific ‘target’ RNA sequences are copied to the DNA form. Finally, this DNA is amplified by a polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Millions of copies are made so that enough DNA is present to be detected, finally leading to a diagnosis for COVID-19.
RT-qPCR testing requires large quantities of special reagents, expensive laboratory equipment, and highly trained professionals. Recent studies have also shown that test results can change from one day to the next and that the massive amplification process can generate significant errors. For these reasons, worldwide efforts are being devoted to developing faster, more affordable, and more accurate tests. This task is particularly challenging in cases where the “viral load” (the amount of viral RNA) in a sample is low and can evade sensing.
Professor Amit Meller
Faculty of Biomedical Engineering
Using Nanopores to “Sense” COVID-19 and Metastatic Cancer
The new method presented by Prof. Meller’s research group relies on original technologies that the lab has developed in the past two decades, using nanofabricated holes (so-called “nanopores”) to sense single biological molecules. The effectiveness of this technology has already been demonstrated in a number of other biomedical uses.
Unlike conventional molecular diagnostics, which require large volumes of samples containing millions of copies of the same molecule, nanopore sensing analyzes individual biological molecules from much smaller samples. A strong electrical field is used to unfold and thread individual DNA molecules through the nanoscopic hole containing electrical or optical sensors. Each molecule that passes through the hole gives a characteristic “signature,” which enables identification and immediate counting of the molecules. This approach opens up the possibility of miniaturising the diagnostic systems while improving the accuracy and reliability of tests.
In an article recently published in ACS Nano, the researchers present two applications of their new method: identifying RNA molecules that signal the emergence of metastatic cancer and detecting coronavirus RNA.
In the first application, the researchers demonstrated the method’s potential for early detection of metastatic cancer by quantifying the levels of MACC1 — one of the primary genes known to signal the formation of a metastatic state. Thanks to its high degree of sensitivity, the new technique successfully quantified the gene’s expression in cancerous cells at the early stages of illness (known as stages I and II) — a challenge that PCR-based technologies failed to meet. Needless to say, the earlier these genetic biomarkers are discovered, the better the chances of successful treatment.
In the second application, the researchers detected the RNA molecules of the SARS-CoV-2 virus using the same approach. Unlike other tests, the new approach avoids introducing “noise” and errors into the system, obtaining a more precise and accurate analysis method.
Commercializing the Technology
With further work, the nanopore sensing system is expected to become a portable device that will make cumbersome lab equipment unnecessary. Technological and clinical research is continuing at the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, in collaboration with the BioBank at the Rambam Health Care Campus. At the same time, steps are being taken to commercialize the technology in order to make it available for general use as soon as possible.
Eytan Stibbe is the second Israeli astronaut to launch into space. Seen here at a press conference in Tel Aviv on May 5, 2021. (Flash90)
Returns on developing new drugs are being outpaced by rising costs. (EvaluatePharma via CytoReason)
Tomer Shlomi
Professor Amit Meller