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.”

Ramon.Space builds space resilient super-computing systems that revolutionize the way software is written, applied, and processed in space.

 

Article published at www.jpost.com on May 25, 2021.

 

The Ramon.Space team. (photo credit: Courtesy)

Yokneam-based space computing solutions company Ramon.Space said Tuesday it raised $17.5 million in Series A funding.

The capital will be used to continue development of the company’s computing solutions, support its rapidly expanding US and Israel operations, and expand the team globally, the company said. The round includes StageOne Ventures, Deep Insight, WorldQuant Ventures, UMC Capital and existing investor Grove Ventures.

Ramon.Space builds space resilient super-computing systems that revolutionize the way software is written, applied, and processed in space. The use of software in space has been limited because the hardware needed to support it could not function in such harsh conditions. Ramon.Space aims to transform the way software and hardware are used in space so applications can be developed, updated and adapted in real-time, creating infinite possibilities for new space satellite payloads and deep space missions.

The company’s technology is already deployed in space and used in many satellites and more than 50 space missions across the solar system, with zero failures, the company said.

In March, the company’s supercomputers were deployed in autonomous satellites developed as part of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Adelis-SAMSON project, which were launched from Kazakhstan and will be used to calculate the location of planes, ships and people.

“Ramon.Space technology will play a disruptive and revolutionary role in solving some of the key challenges in this industry,” said Barak Ben-Eliezer, Managing Partner at Deep Insight. “Their innovation has helped accelerate new space intelligent systems and data processing within a $350 billion space industry expected to grow to more than $1 trillion.”

Ramon.Space is named after Israel’s first astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died in 2003 when his space shuttle burnt up as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

Sharp rise is due to increase in later-stage funding rounds and is indication that ecosystem is maturing, Start-Up Nation Central study says

 

Article published at www.timesofisrael.com on May 30, 2021.

 

Illustrative image of a doctor with digital icons (chaiyapruek2520, iStock by Getty Images)

Israeli companies in the digital health sector raised some $700 million during the first quarter of 2021, almost matching the amount raised by startups in the field in the whole of 2020, new data by Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit that tracks the nation’s tech industry, shows.

“As the investment world and the healthcare industry begin to look beyond the COVID-19 pandemic,” they set their sights on Israel, the so-called Startup Nation “and the incredible innovation taking place in the local health-tech scene, particularly in the fields of deep tech and AI that are game-changers when it comes to decision support, diagnostics, and clinical workflow management,” the nonprofit said in a blogpost last week, based on research conducted by its analyst Lena Rogovin.

The main reason for this quarter’s uptick — the sum is equal to 85% of all of the funding raised by the sector in 2020 — is an increase in the later-stage funding rounds, SNC said.

Out of the 31 funding rounds that were completed in Q1 this year, 17 were B rounds or later rounds, compared to a total of only 21 later-stage rounds in 2020.

The median funding amount raised in 2021 more than doubled that of the previous year, “climbing from $6 million to an astounding $14 million, a sign that the ecosystem is maturing and investors are recognizing the opportunities in growth companies,” the blogpost said.

Investments in the sector increased across the board, with a “slight advantage” for companies in the diagnostics, decision support and remote monitoring fields, the blogpost said.

The five startups that raised the most funds in the first quarter of the year were diagnostic firm K Health, a developer of an AI-based personal health assistant, which raised $132 million in a round E at a $1.4 billion valuation in January, marking the first mega round raised — over $100 million — in the Israeli digital health sector.

C2i Genomics, a developer of a liquid biopsy for cancer tumor monitoring, became the second mega-round digital health startup, raising $100 million in the quarter; Viz.ai, a developer of AI-powered stroke care technology, raised $71 million; Tyto Care, which developed a handheld device for on-demand remote medical exams, raised $50 million; and Ibex Medical Analytics, a developer of cancer diagnostic software for use by pathologists, raised $38 million.

“The strong start to 2021 shows that Israel has a lot to offer both in terms of the post-corona reality and for other areas of digital health which were less of a focus for investors in 2020, but remain essential for global healthcare industry transformation in the longer term. As the healthcare situation returns to normal, interest is starting to shift back to other parts of the sector that were a lower priority during the height of the pandemic,” wrote Rogovin, the report’s author.

“The companies that are receiving the most attention are those associated with deep-tech and artificial intelligence and we anticipate that they will remain the core technologies going forward in 2021 with an emphasis on decision support and clinical workflow management,” she added.

The digital health sector surged globally in the first quarter of the year with $8.5 billion invested in startups, vs $5.3 billion in Q1 a year earlier, according to Start-up Health, as the coronavirus pandemic highlighted how much remote care and telehealth are becoming the new normal.

A group of 20 Israeli mobility companies has joined up with government-owned transportation firms, authorities, municipalities and universities to form a private-public consortium that will tackle traffic congestion, road accidents and safety, and air pollution across Israel.

 

Article published at www.nocamels.com on May 24, 2021.

 

Israeli road traffic. Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

A group of 20 Israeli mobility companies has joined up with government-owned transportation firms, authorities, municipalities and universities to form a private-public consortium that will tackle traffic congestion, road accidents and safety, and air pollution across Israel.

The consortium participants will share anonymized data collected from users to develop new models for reducing traffic and crashes via a technological platform developed by the Israel Smart Mobility Living Lab (ISMLL), a newly launched NGO that aims to accelerate transportation innovation on a national level. The organization says its mission is to facilitate collaboration between parties for data- and technology-based countrywide projects, according to an announcement this month.

SEE ALSO: Israeli Startup Waycare Taps AI To Increase Traffic Safety, Reduce Time On Roads

The ISMLL recently received a $1 million investment by the Israel Innovation Authority and the Fuel Choices and Smart Mobility Initiative, a national program driven by 10 government ministries (Energy, Transport, Economy, Environmental Protection, Science, Finance, Defense, Agriculture, Foreign Affairs) and led by the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Israel Smart Mobility Living Lab was founded by Dr. Smadar Itskovich, who led the Division for Industrial Development in Ashdod Municipality and the Ashdod Smart Mobility Living Lab, which she later expanded into the Israel Smart Mobility Living Lab; Itshak Turgeman, an executive who has led a number of educational initiatives over the past decade including as general director of the Rashi Foundation; and Eran Shir, the co-founder and CEO of AI road safety company Nexar who also serves as the Consortium Chairman.

Ayalon highway traffic in Tel Aviv, May 2017. Deposit Photos

The lab is based on the concept of the Trust::Data Alliance developed by MIT Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland, a leading computational scientist and serial entrepreneur who also serves as a member of the ISMLL advisory board. This alliance’s mission is to create open-source tools and services that foster the development of a secure internet-based network of trusted data. It works to build new models “for digital identity, data provenance, universal access, and secure privacy-preserving transactions to harness the future potential of global data sharing.”

The unique public-private cooperation, the ISMLL indicated in a statement, can be used by transportation companies, governments and municipalities to address local and national transportation challenges by integrating data-driven sources such as traffic cameras, logs, and app usage information, while also providing R&D opportunities in real-world environments and facilitating interactions for a greater social good.

Nexar is one of the 20 companies in the ISMLL consortium, as is transportation data firm Moovit (acquired by Intel last year), traffic management company Waycare, smart road startup NoTraffic, simulation company Cognata, and autonomous robot company Blue White Robotics. among many others.

Participants also include Clal insurance, a major Israeli insurance firm, as well as Japanese insurance company Sompo, the municipalities of Ashdod, Tel Aviv, and Karlsruhe in Germany, academic institutions such as MIT, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and the non-profit research center for applied computer science the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI), also in Karlsruhe; government-owned companies such as Netivei Israel and Elta, the Israel National Road Safety Authority.

“The technological infrastructure that we launched will enable partnership and collaboration in national projects. Tech companies will give other companies and government-owned companies access to their data, under their control, to face challenges like reducing car accidents and traffic congestion,” said Dr. Itskovich in the announcement.

“We believe that Israel’s complex transportation challenges and advanced AI technological skills will turn it into an international innovation hub,” she added.

Aviv Zeevi, the head of the Technological Infrastructure Division at the Israel Innovation Authority said that the project was launched “to accelerate innovation and solve technological challenges in Israel and around the world by using AI to get practical insights from data and cultivating collaboration between tech companies.”

The Nexar app and dashcam. Screenshot from a Nexar video on YouTube.

“The goal is to strengthen and improve Israel’s competitive smart and autonomous mobility industries. The collaboration of so many government-owned companies and tech companies is heartwarming and shows the need for this platform and the great spirit of Israeli companies, who love to join the national effort to face challenges, especially using advanced technology.”

The launch of the project was officially announced last week at the 9th EcoMotion Conference, an event focused on innovation in the transportation and mobility sector. EcoMotion is a joint venture of the Israeli Innovation Institute, the Smart Mobility Initiative (in the Prime Minister’s Office) and the Ministry of Economy and Industry.

Israel’s traffic problem

Traffic congestion is a major problem in Israel and is likely to get much worse, according to a 2019 OECD report. A small country with a population of some nine million people, Israel has the highest road congestion of any OECD country by a wide margin as transportation is largely based on the use of private cars, which creates massive traffic jams particularly in the center – Israel’s economic hub.

The share of travelers using public transportation is relatively low in metropolitan areas — around 20 percent — and is declining “as a result of poor service quality and rising incomes,” reads the OECD report “Assessing incentives to reduce congestion in Israel.”

According to a separate OECD report, Israel’s costs of congestion are estimated at around two percent of GDP, “above levels in other high-income economies.”

Traffic on Hashalom road in Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo by juliana souza on Unsplash

A 2019 study titled “Traffic congestion on Israeli roads: faulty public policy or preordained?” suggests that Israel’s high traffic congestion stems from public policy based on the short-term perspectives as well as the political and personal interests of policymakers. “While the government has been allocating increasing funds in recent years to developing a public transportation infrastructure, it has also committed enormous sums to developing road infrastructure, higher than those devoted to public transportation. In addition, the share of taxation from motor vehicles has grown substantially, reinforcing the government’s incentive to sustain the increase in the number of vehicles,” reads the abstract.

According to a 2014 study by the Knesset Research and Information Center, the public transit infrastructure lags behind other developed countries in the OECD by about 25 years.

Through the congestion was alleviated briefly during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 due to lockdowns and restrictions, the traffic problem has roared back as the government began rolling back almost all measures earlier this year because of falling infections and death rates.

Solar panels either use photovoltaic cells or photoelectrochemical cells to function and photoelectrochemical cells can only generate energy during sunlight hours.

 

Article published at www.jpost.com on May 28, 2021.

 

Solar panels at one of the projects of Enlight Renewable Energy (photo credit: RACHAF PRO DRONE)

Scientists in Israel have made a breakthrough in the field of solar energy, potentially leading to making the alternative energy form more efficient and productive in future use.
Researchers, led by Professor Avner Rothschild of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Technion, in partnership with scientists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin have developed advances in the understanding of how semiconductors work.

Solar panels either use photovoltaic cells or photoelectrochemical cells to function. Photoelectrochemical cells can only generate energy during sunlight hours and require external batteries to maintain energy during the night.

On the other hand, photovoltaic cells do not need external batteries but use semiconductors instead.
Semiconductors enable light energy to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, which are then stored as a separate fuel source for later. Hematite, the most common material that is used as a semiconductor, suffers from a lack of efficiency, which leads to a huge waste in potential energy.

Rothschild’s team developed a new technique for testing the efficiency of hematite and other semiconductor materials, which will hopefully in the future allow for more effective solar panels to be developed.

Alan Aziz, CEO of Technion UK, said, “Reducing our use of fossil fuels is the single most important challenge our planet faces, and the answer has to be using the free energy that is all around us. Improving solar panels is just another bright idea to emerge from Technion scientists.”

Solar power is one of the major sources of renewable energy for the future, with solar panels converting the Sun’s light rays into electricity. Some sources estimate that the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth in just an hour and a half is enough to cover our global energy consumption for an entire year.

The lab has previously engineered biological sensors capable of recognizing the presence of arsenic and other poisons in water, or the presence of blood in urine.

 

Article published at www.jpost.com on May 29, 2021.

 

L-R: Assistant Professor Ramez Daniel and Dr. Ximing Li (photo credit: RAMI SHLUSH / TECHNION)

A team of scientists from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa has taught colonies of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to recognize and respond to certain geometric patterns, such as letters.

The study, led by Dr. Ximing Li and Assistant Prof. Ramez Daniel, was published earlier this week in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
Daniel’s lab work is in the field of synthetic biology, specifically in the generation of biological circuits that in essence create living computers, or very primitive brains.
The lab utilizes a known scientific phenomenon called “quorum sensing.” Colonies of certain microbes are naturally capable of communicating within the colony and microbes can respond differently when alone, as opposed to when they are in a colony.

This phenomenon can be seen occurring naturally within our own bodies, every time an infection causes multiple cell types within our immune system to react in order to protect the organism.
By engineering cells to perform certain function types, one can cause individual cells to be turned on and off and perform a function – for example, fluorescence.
Using this technique, the lab has previously engineered biological sensors capable of recognizing the presence of arsenic and other poisons in water, or the presence of blood in urine.
By combining their cell engineering skills with the quorum sensing properties of the E. Coli bacteria colonies, the scientists were able, for the first time, to create an artificial neural network (ANN) capable of performing the relatively complex task of geometric-pattern recognition.

According to the researchers, the study’s results are a proof of concept for what ANNs can do.
“For example, the framework and algorithm in our study can be used to facilitate the design of living therapeutics, such as targeted drug release systems based on engineered probiotic bacteria systems,” the researchers said.

“Our proposed system can also be potentially extended to engineer inter-cellular communications in yeast cells and mammalian cells,” the researchers stated. “For the latter in particular, engineering how tissue cells contact each other would enable new applications for programming tissue development, growth and repair.

Israeli-Arab researcher at the Technion in Haifa discovers that nano-sized baking soda placed near a tumor improves the cancer treatment, especially in breast cancer.

 

Article published at www.unitedwithisrael.org on May 30, 2021.

 

Dra. Hanan Abumanhal del Technion (Technion)

Baking soda, the simple household product familiar to everybody, may revolutionize the treatment of breast cancer, researchers at Israel’s Technion Institute have discovered.

A graduate research student at the Technion Institute has found a revolutionary solution for the treatment of breast cancer, showing that sodium bicarbonate – baking soda – can increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatment because this natural substance changes the acidity of the cancerous tumor and thus increases the effectiveness of chemotherapy.

“Many studies show and emphasize the importance of the environment of the tumor in supporting cancer cells and the ability of the cells to penetrate nearby tissues and send metastases to other organs of the body,” explained Dr. Hanan Abumanhal, a resident of northern Israel who got her PhD degree last week at the prestigious institution.

Dr. Abumanhal knew that environmental changes in the cancerous tumor tissue can affect the response of cells to treatments and encourage the development of resistance to anti-cancer treatment.

“That is why it is important to develop a synergistic treatment that changes the entire environmental balance and thus ‘suffocate’ the tumor,” she explained.

Dr. Abumanhal focused on a particularly aggressive version of breast cancer, a version created from a combination of mutations and therefore relatively resistant to existing treatments. She developed nano-particles containing baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) which can be localized on cancerous tumors.

“In this way they changed the acidity of the tissue and thus increased the penetration chemotherapeutic drugs,” she said, explaining that cancer cells are characterized by a more acidic environment than that prevailing in other body tissues.

The nano particles of baking soda reduce the acidity in the area of the tumor.

“Healthy cells also increase acidity when required for rapid energy production, but in cancer cells this is the dominant pathway for energy generation in the cell; acidity makes the cancer cells more aggressive and more metastatic,” she said. “Introducing baking soda using the method we have developed will make it possible to reduce the dose of the drug and thus reduce the side effects.”

Thus, by using a simple compound injected into the area of the tumor using very sophisticated nano-technology methods, the anti-cancer activity of chemotherapeutic drugs is enhanced and may improve treatment of the disease.

Abumanhal, from the city of Umm al-Fahm, is married to a pediatrician and the mother of two, received her doctorate at the Technion after completing her bachelor’s and master’s degree in the excellence programs in pharmaceutical sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2016, she was one of four winners of the prestigious Ariane de Rothschild four-year research scholarship, which recognizes excellence. The threshold for admission to the program is particularly high and allows doctoral students to focus on their research field.