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By 2025, some 8 million consumer vehicles shipping from manufacturers will feature Level 3 and 4 technologies, where drivers are still necessary but able to completely shift safety-critical functions to the vehicle under certain conditions, and Level 5 technology, where no driver will be required at all. (Source: ABI Research)

Article by Kevin Hattori, published on American Technion Society on May 30, 2019.

The Technion is helping drive the development of the autonomous vehicles coming down the road in many ways.

The race to develop truly autonomous automobiles is in high gear, and car manufacturers around the globe are looking at Israel for the advances and brainpower that will help make those dreams a reality. And in a proof point of the Technion’s influence on Israeli industry, its researchers and alumni are right in the middle of autonomous vehicle-related partnerships with American, German, Japanese, and Korean car manufacturers. The collaborations don’t stop with the cars themselves, either. An automotive cybersecurity company led by a Technion alumnus is currently working with a Michigan-based company to create a holistic cybersecurity solution for connected and autonomous vehicles.

Toyota recently announced plans to commercially market an autonomous car in 2020 under its Lexus brand. It will have Level 4 autonomy, which means it will be able to drive independently, but only on specific routes and in specific conditions. The advancement is possible because of Toyota’s collaboration with AI vision company Cortica. Founded in 2007 by Professor Yehoshua (Josh) Zeevi and doctoral graduates Igal Raichelgauz and Karina Ordinaev, Cortica is based on brain research conducted at the Technion. An alumnus, Prof. Zeevi is a member of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and holds the Barbara and Norman Seiden Chair in Computer Science.

Innoviz Technologies of Israel is supplying its solid-state Lidar, short for light detection and ranging, sensing to the BMW Group for its autonomous vehicle production platforms. Innoviz Co-founders Zohar Zisapel and Oren Rozenzweig are Technion alumni. The solid-state high-resolution technology enables autonomous vehicles to sense their surroundings even at long distances, in varying weather and light conditions, and in multi-LiDAR environments.

The benefits of the collaboration between Hyundai, the Technion and Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology on artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and cyber security are multi-fold. In addition to helping automotive firms and startups in Israel launch their products with Hyundai’s vehicle product line, the alliance will also help Hyundai Motors establish itself as a leader in automotive robotics market.

In a partnership with Volkswagen and Champion Motors, Israeli startup Mobileye plans to bring autonomous electric vehicle taxi service to Israel in 2019. Mobileye’s research and development is headed by Technion alumnus Dr. Gaby Hayon.

Ford is developing a decision-making system in Israel for driving autonomous cars. Such a system is a critical challenge in the development of driverless cars, since difficult decisions must be made within a fraction of a second in a car surrounded by moving traffic. Professor Shie Mannor, of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, will lead Ford’s new activity. He is also the head of the Technion and Intel Corporation’s new Center for Artificial Intelligence.

SafeRide, an Israeli automotive cybersecurity company, has formed a strategic partnership with Irdeto of Michigan to provide original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and tier-1 suppliers with a holistic cybersecurity solution for connected and autonomous vehicles. Saferide CEO Yossi Vardi is a Technion alumnus.

The car of the future may be available at your local dealership sooner than you think. Autonomous vehicles, once a notion of pure fiction, will soon to be a reality and part of everyday life. Just as breakthroughs like seat belts, anti lock brakes, and self-parking capabilities irreversibly changed automobiles and our experience of them, autonomous cars will revolutionize how we drive, live, and travel.

The president of Technion, Israel’s leading high tech university, tells Science|Business how a sense of precariousness feeds the country’s technology edge.

Article by Éanna Kelly, published on NoCamels on June 13, 2019.

Technion President Peretz Lavie (Credit Nitzan Zohar: Office of the Spokesperson, Technion).

Peretz Lavie, president of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was standing on a volcano in Iceland waiting for an urgent call.

It was August 2013, and ostensibly Lavie was on holiday. Instead, he was desperately seeking reassurance from security staff back home that all his students had gasmasks – just in case. Bashar al-Assad, Syrian president and Israel’s erratic neighbour, had just deployed chemical weapons on his people, shocking the world.

Israelis are accustomed to a certain sense of precariousness in their normal day-to-day lives, but this stands out as a particularly harrowing event for Lavie. “Tell me which other head of a major university faces these issues? I don’t think anyone in their wildest nightmare could think of such a scenario,” Lavie told Science|Business.

Yet in keeping with the general attitude of a country that is good at adapting to new situations, Lavie doesn’t dwell long on the issue: he moves forward. “You must be optimistic to live in this part of the world,” he said.

Looking to the future is something researchers and students at Technion, Israel’s oldest university, are famed for doing. Graduates have translated their ideas, skills and ambition into the USB memory stick, drip irrigation, instant messaging and rasagiline, a drug for treating early-stage Parkinson’s disease.

Campus entrepreneurship fever has made Technion, founded in 1912 in the hilly port city of Haifa, one of the main fuses for the country’s roaring tech sector. “Many of our graduates are running the economy,” Lavie said.

Technion students have created over 2,000 companies. The record for a single student is 21. Lavie, a pioneering researcher in sleep disorders, has himself founded or co-founded five medical device companies.

In a country known as start-up nation, people take failure on the chin, Lavie says.

“Israelis don’t stop asking questions,” he said. “Shimon Peres [former Israeli president and prime minister] said the most typical character of an Israeli is someone who is dissatisfied – it makes us bad at politics, but good at science.”

The same fiercely entrepreneurial streak is not apparent in many other pockets of the world. “In some countries if you fail, that’s the end of it. I know people here who succeeded on their 10th attempt,” Lavie said.

“In Japan, there is the same level of ambition as here but it’s the failures that they cannot tolerate,” he said. “In Brazil, if you have a failed start-up, you can’t apply for more grants.”

This drive is absent in much of Europe too, he says. “I feel parents there don’t push their kids to be top of their class. In Israel, parents push their kids to excel. But I have the feeling that, when I go to other places like Australia or Canada, the attitude of many people there is to find a job with a good pension, and then enjoy time down the pub on the weekend,” he said.

Military experience, mandated in Israel, also instils leadership, Lavie says. His theory is that pilots make the best entrepreneurs. “I think when someone is given responsibility for a piece of equipment worth maybe €100,000, running a company afterwards becomes something of a third or fourth order of difficulty,” he said.

Global fundraising

Lavie is stepping down as president in October after serving 12 years. His successor will be Uri Sivan, a physicist famous for creating a tiny transistor based on strands of gold wire and DNA.

“I’m the first president who did more than two terms,” said Lavie. They said, ‘you didn’t learn enough, we’d like to go on for one more term’. I negotiated to 10 years, instead of 12.” He is undecided, as yet, about what to do afterwards.

After his sleep research training in Florida and San Diego, and a stint as a professor in Harvard, Lavie joined the Faculty of Medicine at Technion in 1975, and founded the Sleep Research Laboratory and the Centre for Sleep Medicine. He was the dean of medicine and vice president for resource development before being elected for a four-year term as president in 2009. Four years later, he was re-elected for another term.

One of Lavie’s last actions as president is steering the university’s $1.8 billion global fundraising campaign. Government money for research in Israel is above the EU average, but he said, “Without philanthropy, we’re a small university in the Middle East.”

A new cutting-edge artificial intelligence lab is on the shopping list, but the really “hot stuff” is quantum computing, said Lavie. “Those universities that do not develop it will stay behind. We don’t have enough in quantum right now,” he said. “The country is playing catch up a little.” There is a new government strategy for quantum, although, “The start-up nation doesn’t typically wait for governments,” Lavie said.

Big tech and research firms keep arriving in Israel, but for a country boiling with cash for technology investment, industry contributions to Technion’s coffers are relatively low – 11 per cent of revenue comes from company collaboration, with the rest coming from competitive funds.

“We have lots of giants close by, such as Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo, but they [answer to] their HQs in the US, where the money is decided. We have research agreements with industry, and they give scholarships to students, but they don’t give us new buildings, or sponsor research chairs,” said Lavie.

In Israel, students gain a foundation in industrial technology early. From their fourth semester onwards, Technion students are allowed to work part-time in companies. “They can do 20 hours a week – it’s a double edged sword for us. Students get experience, but it often stretches the student degree from four to five years. We pay a penalty with extra cost,” Lavie said.

All universities in Israel are facing the same challenge of recruiting and retaining good staff. Astronomical private sector salaries in buzzy fields like AI and cybersecurity have made academia a harder sell. “We have a rough time competing with industry,” Lavie said. The average recruitment package for an assistant professor at Technion is $1 million, with this entire amount having to come through philanthropy.

Restricted borders

An unusual aspect of the Technion story is that, despite the world-renowned reputation, there are fierce restrictions on who can attend the university.

“The immigration laws in Israel are very tough,” Lavie said. “Take the percentage of faculty members in US universities who come from outside America – you’re at 40 per cent. Here, we have a handful.”

Whereas the best universities draw students from around the world, cross-border collaboration with neighbours is almost impossible. “We rely on nine million people, that’s it. Just imagine what would happen if I could attract the best minds in the world here? I wish I could open the Technion,” Lavie said. “It’s a matter of prestige; it’s about being a world class university.” He would like to attract Chinese students to Israel. “Right now, the US is getting the most benefit here,” he said.

Lavie says he needs civil engineers, but can’t find anyone with the right qualifications in Israel.

Academic staff numbers are controlled by the government. “The ratio of faculty to students in Technion is ridiculous: it’s about 1:25,” he said. “Government cuts sent us down from 640 to 540 faculty, but we could possibly go back up again to 600. However, we cannot go to 1,200, like at the MIT. I wish we could,” he said.

The university has found routes to open up internationally. In 2017, Lavie engineered a joint venture with Cornell University to create a new university on Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island, initiated by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He also set up a new science and technology university in Shantou, China, funded by the Guangdong provincial government with the support of the billionaire Li Ka Shing.

The Chinese base has 1,500 students and 15 Israeli staff. In the future, the plan is to grow the campus to 5,000 students and 300 faculty, and teach subjects in English. Lavie says there are no plans to explore an outpost in Europe, despite offers.

Protests

On trips abroad, Lavie has occasionally been made aware of certain negative perceptions of Technion. “We are considered by some student unions as an apartheid university, and a wing of the defence ministry,” he said.

The new home on Roosevelt Island drew criticism from some New Yorkers, who argued that the university’s research and development has helped sustain Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.

Technion’s back catalogue of innovations includes the remote-controlled D-9 bulldozer for the Israeli military, which has been used to demolish buildings in Palestinian territories (The UN and much of the world refer to these as the occupied territories, whereas Israel calls them disputed territories.)

Lavie has faced protests during trips to foreign universities, and calls to boycott Technion because of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. “They have demonstrated against me in several countries. It’s awkward but I say to them, come on our campus and you’ll hear as much Arabic as Hebrew,” he said.

Twenty per cent of the Technion student body is Arab, and Lavie says there is extra effort to help these students integrate.

Only about 1 per cent of Israel’s Arab population serve in the army, with the majority going straight from secondary school to university. “We provide them with big brother and sister groups. We recruit Arab faculty members. Our first (online) MOOC (course) was in Arabic,” he said.

On campus, politics doesn’t penetrate in the same way it does in ordinary life, said Lavie. “The students probably don’t have the time,” he said.

Israeli companies specializing in artificial intelligence raised nearly 40 percent of the total venture capital funds raised by the Israeli tech ecosystem for 2018, despite accounting for just 17 percent of the total number of innovative technology companies in the country, according to a report this month by Start-Up Nation Central (SNC).

Article by NoCamels Team, published on NoCamels on March 17, 2019.

The amount of equity investments in Israel in 2018, according to a Start-Up Nation figure.

Israel is home to over 1,000 companies, academic research centers, and multinational R&D centers specializing in AI, including those that develop core AI technologies, as well as those that utilize AI technologies for their vertical-related products such as in healthcare, cybersecurity, automotive, and manufacturing among others, SNC noted.

Over the course of 2018, Israeli startups and companies raised over $6 billion in 681 funding rounds, marking a 15 percent increase from 2017 ($5.2B) and a 140 percent jump from 2014, according to the report. Of this sum, $2.24 billion went to AI-focused companies, accounting for 37 percent of the total capital raised and representing a threefold increase from 2014. In addition, 32 percent of all funding rounds for the year went to AI firms, according to the report.

Prominent funding rounds raised by companies utilizing AI in 2018 included DevOps firm JFrog, a company that automates software updates which closed a $165 million Series D round, Trax Image Recognition which raised $125 million, eToro with $100 million, and Habana Labs, which develops AI processors, with a $75 million round led by Intel Capital.

The biggest acquisition of the year was that of Datorama, which developed an AI-powered marketing intelligence platform, by SalesForce for $850 million. Other significant AI-related acquisitions in 2018 were of Nutrino for $100 million by Medtronic, and video synopsis solutions company Briefcam for $90 million by Canon.

The SNC report noted that a number of events in 2018 boosted the AI ecosystem in Israel, including the launch of a new Center for Artificial Intelligence by Intel and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and the announcement by US tech giant Nvidia (which acquired Israel’s Mellanox Technologies last week for $6.9 billion) that it too was opening a new AI research center.

A number of high-profile AI products developed by Israeli teams working for multinationals were also unveiled this year. In May, Google came out with Google Duplex, a system for conducting natural sounding conversations developed by Yaniv Leviathan, principal engineer, and Yossi Matias, vice president of engineering and the managing director of Google’s R&D Center in Tel Aviv. And in July 2018, IBM unveiled Project Debater, a system powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can debate humans, developed over six years in IBM’s Haifa research division in Israel.

Earlier this year, the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) warned that despite industry achievements, Israel was lagging behind other countries regarding investment in AI infrastructures and urgently needed a national AI strategy to keep its edge. The IIA called for the consolidation of all sectors – government, academia, and industry – to establish a vision and a strategy on AI for the Israeli economy.

Other sectors with significant funding include cybersecurity, a field in which Israel thrives. The year ended with $1.19 billion in investments for cybersecurity companies, a 47 percent increase from 2017, in 117 investment rounds (39 percent more deals than 2017).

In healthcare, Israeli companies raised almost $900 million in investments in 2018. Israeli healthcare-related technologies accounted for 24 percent of the companies in the ecosystem, and the same share of the total number of funding rounds and capital raised.

In financial tech, some $832 million in investments were raised in 82 deals, almost double the total amount raised during 2017.

Israel’s blockchain industry also saw some growth, with 155 active companies in the field, and $107 million in venture-backed capital raised in 2018 (a significant increase from the $8.5 million raised in 2014), and $295M through initial coin offerings (ICOs).

The State Of The Israeli Ecosystem

The SNC report, released last week, gives a comprehensive overview of the Israeli high-tech ecosystem, which according to SNC’s Finder database had over 6,600 active companies by the end of 2018, having grown by 27 percent since 2014. The year also saw some 600 companies closed their doors.

The number of active companies in Israel in 2018, according to a Start-Up Nation figure.

The number of funding rounds also increased in 2018, at 681, just two from 2017, but still six percent below the 2016 peak of 721 rounds. At the same time, the median size of all round types rose from $1.5 million in 2014 to $4 million in 2018, as the median size of early-stage rounds more than doubled from $1 million to $2.3 million, while late-stage median size grew from $12 million to $18 million.

According to the report, more than 430 professional investors have a permanent presence in Israel, almost a quarter of which are non-Israeli. Some 1,500 investors, from more than 30 countries, invested in Israeli companies over 2018.

While a majority of deals had at least one Israeli investor, 43 percent had at least one American investor. British investors followed US investors, while German investors were fourth as their participation rose steadily from two percent in 2014 to five percent in 2018.

The report also said that there were 320 multinational companies with a direct presence in Israel, more than 300 with R&D activities across 360 different offices. The majority are based in the United States (246), followed by the UK, Germany, France, and Canada.

Over the course of the year, exits totaled $3.28 billion spanning 97 Israeli high-tech companies, marking a nine percent decline in the number and a 49 percent decline in the total amount, compared to 2014, (a peak year for exits over the last five years). This trend is largely due to companies staying private for longer, since they are able to raise large private rounds, SNC noted.

US companies were the largest acquirers of Israeli start-ups with 49 percent of all deals.

Three researchers, from the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and Weizmann Institute of Science, will each be awarded $100,000, one of the largest unrestricted prizes ever created for early-career researchers in Israel.

Article by Israil Institute of Technology, published on Technion.ac.il on April 8, 2019.

(l-r) Associate Professor Moran Bercovici, of the Technion, Drs. Michal Rivlin and Erez Berg of the Weizmann Institute of Science. (Photo courtesy of Israil Institute of Technology)

HAIFA, ISRAEL (April 8, 2019) – Associate Professor Moran Bercovici, of the Technion Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, is one of three Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in Israel Laureates for 2019. The honor, bestowed by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, New York Academy of Sciences, and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (IASH), was announced in Jerusalem on Sunday, April 7. Also awarded were Drs. Michal Rivlin and Erez Berg of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

The Blavatnik Awards recognize outstanding, innovative early-career scientists and engineers for both their extraordinary achievements and promise for future discoveries. The prizes are awarded to promising scientists and engineers aged 42 and younger for breakthrough research in the disciplines of chemistry, life sciences, and physical sciences and engineering.

In 2019, 33 nominations were received from seven universities Israeli universities. Members of the Awards’ Scientific Advisory Council, including IASH President Professor Nili Cohen; Co-chair and Nobel Prize Laureate Distinguished Professor Aaron Ciechanover; and President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Academy of Sciences Mr. Ellis Rubinstein were also invited to submit nominations. A distinguished jury of leading senior scientists and engineers from throughout the country selected the laureates.

Prof. Bercovici (36) was selected for his innovative research in microfluidics, contributing to fundamental understanding of the chemical and physical behavior of fluids at extremely small scales, as well as to the invention of cutting-edge technologies in this field. His highly multidisciplinary research, which couples fluid mechanics, electric fields, heat transfer, chemical reactions, and biology, has the potential to not only miniaturize existing large-scale processes but also to create new capabilities that are not possible at large scale. For example, Dr. Bercovici and his team at Technion have developed a series of lab-on-a-chip technologies that significantly shorten the time and improve the sensitivity of traditional molecular analysis techniques, enabling rapid and early disease diagnostics and offering new research tools to scientists. Innovations coming from his lab also have potential use in many other fields, including soft actuators, adaptive optics, single cell analysis, and microscale 3D printing.

The Laureates will join more than 250 of their peers as fellow members of the Blavatnik Science Scholars community. They will also be invited to attend the annual Blavatnik Science Symposium each summer in New York City, where members come together to collaborate on cross-disciplinary research and share new ideas.

European Research Council Advanced Grants Won by Technion Professors Ashraf Brik and Amit Meller

Article by Israil Institute of Technology, published on Technion.ac.il on April 15, 2019.

(Photo courtesy of Israil Institute of Technology)

Profs. Ashraf Brik and Amit Meller of Technion-Israel Institute for Technology in Haifa have won prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants from the European Union’s Framework Research Program Horizon 2020.

The grants for breakthrough innovation in research are in the Advanced Grant category — a maximum grant of € 2.5 million each, awarded to leading researchers with unprecedented research achievements over the past decade.

Prof. Ashraf Brik of the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry will receive his grant for the development of innovative technology for the synthesis, delivery, and activation of synthetic proteins in the living cell. He completed his MSc and Ph.D. degrees at Technion. After an impressive career at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, he joined Technion’s Chemistry Faculty.

Prof. Brik has won numerous awards including the Humboldt Prize (Germany), the Yoshimasa Hirata Award (Japan), the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award, the Eli Hurvitz Prize (Israel) and the Israel Chemical Society Prize for Outstanding Young Scientist. He was recently elected a member of the Israel Young Academy.

Prof. Brik has developed innovative methods for creating (synthesizing) artificial proteins with desirable characteristics. These proteins are used in structural, biochemical, biophysical and functional analyses.

Prof. Amit Meller of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering received his grant for the development of an innovative system for mapping the proteome – the complex repertoire of proteins in the cell – at the level of the single protein molecule. Prof. Meller joined the Technion following an illustrious academic career at Harvard and Boston Universities. He is a member of the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI) and the Lokey Center for Life Sciences and Engineering at Technion. Prof. Meller received and directed a multi-year grant from the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence (I-Core) in the field of living-cells physics. He has won numerous awards including the Diane Sherman Prize for Medical Innovations and the Mérieux Grant for the Advancement of Medical Research.

Prof. Meller is among the first developers of single DNA molecule sequencing technology using nanopores – a technology relevant to a range of essential medical applications. The grant is expected to promote its use for mapping all proteins in the cell.

ERC grants are awarded under Horizon 2020 – the EU Framework Research Program, which supports outstanding research activities, especially interdisciplinary research, and allocates grants in three categories – the ERC Starting Grant, the ERC Consolidator Grant, and the ERC Advanced Grant.

ERC representative Carlos Moedas said the grant was given to researchers, “for their pioneering work, which has the potential to change our daily lives and provide solutions to some of the important challenges we face.”

Marcelle Machluf, the dean of biotechnology and food engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is working on an innovative cancer treatment called nanoghosts.

Article by Selah Maya Zighelboim, published on Jewish Exponent on April 21, 2019.

(Photo courtesy of American Technion Society)

Marcelle Machluf, the dean of biotechnology and food engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is working on an innovative cancer treatment called nanoghosts.

Nanoghosts, a drug-delivery technology that uses adult stem cells to transport medicine directly to the tumor site, have already proven successful in treating pancreatic, lung, breast, prostate and brain cancer in mice. Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology named nanoghosts one of Israel’s 60 most impactful developments.

The technology has won Machluf a litany of honors and awards. Machluf, who immigrated to Israel from Morocco at 1, was one of the 14 torch lighters at the Israeli 70th Independence Day ceremony at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl. She was also named “Woman of the Year” last year by Lady Globes, a magazine insert in the Israeli daily financial newspaper Globes.

Machluf visited Philadelphia recently and spoke about her work.

Have the nanoghosts been used to treat people with cancer?

No, that’s the process. It’s already 10 years of progress in terms of research. The patent was fully approved a year ago. The patent was filed here and approved here in the U.S. It’s approved in Europe. The purpose now is to raise funds for the company that we are building, with the aim to go to clinical trial.

What do you think the future of the nanoghosts look like?

Time will tell. First of all, I’m not a prophet, but if I can rely on what I got so far and the results that I got from animals, I’m truly thinking it will be a game changer in this field. Again, it’s not a drug; it’s a platform that delivers the drug, so still we need to rely on drugs that come from companies.

However, it can help the drug work much better with actually less side effects because now the drug will be only down on the tumor site, not like today, where all our bodies are infused with the drug.

Second of all, I am sure it can give a benefit to drugs that were too toxic to be tried alone on patients.

You’re a woman and originally from Morocco, working in science. Do you feel like you’re a minority in this field?

That’s a big question. At the beginning, I felt like I was a minority. First of all, as an immigrant and coming from the Sephardi part of the Jewish people, it was not simple, not for my mother, not for my family.

Also, as a woman, it’s not a woman’s world, back then more than today. Today, at least, we are trying to solve this issue, trying to promote, trying to change the status of a woman in a man’s world, but frankly, I didn’t feel much problem in this part because I was what I am today. I never saw an obstacle in my way and didn’t push it away.

It also depends on the character of the person, how he believes in himself, what he wants to achieve. I never let myself be despaired or think that I can’t do whatever I wanted to do. I can’t say that it was easy. As a woman, I felt like you have to prove much higher things, invest much more time, be more perfect than what a man will be because if you fail or a man will fail on the same situation, it will be much more reflective on the woman than on the man.

Do you have any advice for women or minorities interested in pursuing STEM?

I say it a lot in Israel, because I travel from school to school, especially in the periphery, to show that [anything] can be done. When you have the will to invest, to work hard, you can achieve whatever you want. Money should not be an issue, and today we are aware of that and there is a lot of support in terms of financial support that this will not be the obstacle.

If you believe in yourself, and you need to believe in yourself, and you invest and you pursue … your desires, you will achieve it.

You were also chosen to light the torch at Israel’s 70th anniversary celebration. Can you tell me how that went?

This was the most amazing event for me and honor that one can give me. This is the biggest honor that one can give in Israel, especially choosing a scientist. This technology of nanoghosts was chosen as one of the 60 most important technologies. All of that — and also being an immigrant who came to Israel, that her life was not easy because we came from a social economic situation that was very, very low, and succeeding to be what we call today in the top of one of the universities — I was honored to light the torch for all the ones that want to do things with their life, want to pursue science, want to pursue their dream, and regardless of their backgrounds, can do it.

Researchers are developing complex and precise artificial tissues that can be better integrated into target organs.

Article by Naama Barak, published on Israel21c on April 11, 2019.

The Technion’s new center operates a printer that prints 3D scaffolds and cells that grow into tissue. Photo by Nitzan Zohar/Technion Spokesperson’s Office

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology recently launched a center for the printing of cells, tissues and organs, where 3D scaffolds and cells that grow into tissue are constructed to aid treatment in all areas of regenerative medicine.

Three-dimensional printing of tissue helps researchers develop complex and precise artificial tissues that improve their integration in target organs. This involves the creation of tissue containing a developed system of blood vessels that quickly connect to patients’ own blood vessels.

The 3D Bio-Printing Center for Cell and Biomaterials Printing’s printer translates information obtained from patients’ CT scans into tissue suited to the injury area, and can also design scaffolds or cells to make these tissues.

“You can design as you wish and seed cells in the proper orientation to allow them to better organize into the right tissue structure,” explains Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, dean of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineeringand head of the center.

The printer is relevant to all areas of regenerative medicine. It has several different printing heads that enable the simultaneous creation of printed tissue and can work with a wide range of raw materials such as hydrogels, thermoplastic materials and ointments.

It is equipped with precise motors of variable speed and accuracy of 0.001 mm, as well as a built-in camera that improves the accuracy of the printing needle.

Vectorious Medical Technologies recently announced the first in-human implantation of its miniature, digital, wireless and battery-free implant for left-atrial monitoring to detect #heart failure. Vectorious Medical Co-founder and CEO Oren Goldshtein is a #Technion alumnus. The device is undergoing clinical trials in Germany, Israel, Italy, and the UK.

Article by NoCamels Team, published on NoCamels on February 10, 2019.

Israel’s Vectorious Medical Technologies, which developed a miniature implant for left-atrial monitoring to detect heart failure, announced that it conducted its first in-human implantation of the device as part on a new clinical trial.

Vectorious developed the V-Lap Implant Pressure Sensor, which it calls the world’s first digital, wireless, battery-less device that is able to communicate from deep within the body to measure left atrial pressure (LAP). The pressure of the heart’s left atrium is the earliest and most accurate real-time indication of heart failure exacerbation. An increase in pressure is the earliest sign of impending heart failure – long before clinical symptoms occur, the company says.

The first “in-human” trial was completed in just six minutes, the company said in a statement. It was performed by Professor Horst Sievert, the director of the CardioVascular Center in Frankfurt, Germany.

The trial will enroll up to 30 patients in Germany, Israel, Italy, and the UK.

“This technology will really change the way we manage patients with severe heart failure,” said Sievert in the statement. “This is the first device that specifically enables us to monitor pressure within the left side of the heart – and because of its cloud-based system, we can access patient data on-demand, monitoring the atrial pressure and managing dosages, medications and overall quality of life consistently and remotely.”

Vectorious CEO and co-founder Oren Goldstein said: “Implanting our first patient in the Vector-HF trial is a significant achievement that moves us closer to our goal of enabling optimal management for heart failure patients. This is very advanced technology that we hope will improve the future of chronic cardiac disease treatment.”

In March 2018, Vectorious raised $9.5 million in a Series B funding round led by Boston-based Broadview Ventures and China’s GEOC, with the participation of Israel-based investors. In 2017, Vectorious was one of 15 Israeli startups selected to present their tech to the Chinese market at the annual Israeli roadshow in China, an event organized by the Israel Innovation Authority in cooperation with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.

Vectorious Medical Technologies was founded in 2011.

Private and public institutions around the world are jostling to create new collaboration agreements with Israeli research bodies in an effort to mine the country’s scientific excellence and innovation.

Article by Abigail Klein Leichman, published on Israel21c on March 31, 2019.

From left at the opening ceremony for the Technion-Intel Center for Artificial Intelligence: Intel VP and GM of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group Naveen G. Rao, Technion VP for External Relations Prof. Boaz Golany, Intel CTO Michael Mayberry, Technion Executive VP for Research Prof. Wayne Kaplan, and Oren Gershon from Intel’s Artificial Intelligence Products Group. Photo by Shitzu Photographers/Technion Spokesperson’s Office

Research from Israel is driving awesome advances in medicine, healthcare, water management, autonomous vehicles, consumer products, manufacturing, and – well, you name it.

So it’s only natural that many international academic, corporate and government bodies are signing collaboration agreements with Israeli research universities and hospitals.

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Research from Israel is driving awesome advances in medicine, healthcare, water management, autonomous vehicles, consumer products, manufacturing, and – well, you name it.

So it’s only natural that many international academic, corporate and government bodies are signing collaboration agreements with Israeli research universities and hospitals.

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Nanotechnology is one of the hot fields of shared interest, for application in everything from cancer drug delivery to finding dark matter in outer space.

Israeli physicist Beena Kalisky from Bar-Ilan University’s Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA) is leading a team of researchers in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden in developing a desktop-sized quantum computer.

BINA recently inked research and cooperation deals with the United Nations International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory in Portugal; the University of Jyväskylä in Finland; State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemicals, Fibers & Polymer Materials at Donghua University in Shanghai, and Hanyang University in Seoul.

“Israel offers a combination of good research and good conditions for partners, and that attracts entities to us,” says BINA Director Prof. Dror Fixler, also a member of the Bar-Ilan Faculty of Engineering and a new fellow of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE).

“In order to get big grants for projects, researchers must gather a team of individuals and labs from different places around the globe,” Fixler tells ISRAEL21c.

Bilateral agreements signed by the Israeli government with many countries in Europe and Asia over the last 10 years ease the way for researchers in these countries to find partners in Israel when they need collaborators, he explains.

It is internationally acknowledged that there’s vast innovation to be mined from Israeli research institutions, says Dr. Rafael Beyar, director of Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.

The Georgia Institute of Technology’s Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI) recently chose Rambam as its partner for a new Biomedical and Digital Health Innovation Center in Atlanta to help Israeli med-tech startups get their products on the US healthcare market.

“Being on the forefront of medical practice on one hand, with tight links to the academic world on the other, and enhanced by the entrepreneurial culture around us, creates many innovations within Israel,” Beyar tells ISRAEL21c.

“This is why collaborations with, for example, Atlanta, are so important. [The idea is] to try and generate an easy path to regulatory approval and clinical adoption of leading new innovations that stem from Israel,” says Beyar, who is also a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

GCMI CEO Tiffany Wilson said Rambam was picked because “Israeli engineering and entrepreneurial expertise regularly translate to medical devices capable of improving patient outcomes while driving the overall cost of care down in many parts of the world, including the United States.”

Global healthcare also stands to benefit from joint research projects in the Technion and Intel Corporation’s newly inaugurated Center for Artificial Intelligence.

In addition, the center will apply Technion innovations to the task of making better autonomous vehicles, smart environments, and home and industrial robots using natural language processing, deep learning and hardware optimization for learning algorithms.

“The Technion is the leading university in Israel in the field of artificial intelligence and is one of the top 10 universities in the world in the field,” said Center for Artificial Intelligence Director Prof. Shie Mannor from the Technion’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering.

The Technion and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot have collaborated on nearly 50 research projects since 2011 with the University of Michigan as part of the Michigan-Israel Partnership for Research and Education program.

The latest projects in this collaboration, funded by $20 million from the D. Dan and Betty Kahn Foundation, are focused on building autonomous robots to assist humans with difficult, repetitive or dangerous jobs; and tools to enhance privacy and accuracy in big-data analytics for precision health.

“In this day and age, international and interdisciplinary collaborations are vital to the future of science and engineering,” said Prof. Boaz Golany from the Technion, adding that the research “will benefit people not only in the US and Israel, but worldwide.”

In 2018, the Technion was invited to join EuroTech Universities, a group of research-based universities working to translate basic research into societal solutions.

The other consortium members are the Technical University of Denmark, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, École Polytechnique, TechniEindhoven University of Technology and Technical University of Munich.

“Technion is a perfect match to join and boost this joint endeavor, given its scientific excellence and vibrant innovation ecosystem,” said Jan Mengelers, president of the EuroTech Universities Alliance, established in 2011. “We are pooling our complementary research strengths and connecting our innovation ecosystems for more impact.”

“We bring the ‘Technion way’ of doing things to this partnership: reaching our goals faster and with fewer resources,” Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie said.

“The combination with the great strengths of the other members of the alliance, which comprises an elite group of European universities similar to Technion, will help us ensure we are at the forefront of scientific research, benefiting millions worldwide.”

Water, air and healthcare

Many international bodies are thirsty for Israeli expertise in water and health expertise. The past year alone saw significant international activity in these sectors.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research agreed to a five-year R&D partnership with the Water Institute of the Gulf in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – America’s first international water research center — for joint projects to improve groundwater, farming, drinking water aquifer utilization, surface water and streams.

Justin R. Ehrenwerth, president and CEO of the Water Institute of the Gulf, said, “Our future generations depend on finding and developing the best possible science. And BGU has done a lot of that. You’ve made the desert bloom. You’ve taught the world that water challenges can be solved.”

On March 31, the joint German-Israeli aeroHEALTH Helmholtz International Lab opened on the Rehovot campus of the Weizmann Institute of Science to research the effects of atmospheric aerosols on human health. The lab was developed by scientists from Weizmann, Helmholtz Zentrum München, and Forschungszentrum and is to run initially for five years.

Biomedicine, neuroscience and environmental sciences are the focus of the new Joint Translational Science and Technology Research Institute recently launched in Shanghai’s Zizhu International Education Park in cooperation with the University of Haifa and East China Normal University.

“We believe that our cooperation with ECNU will lead to groundbreaking studies in applied science, biostatistics, brain research, behavioral research and more,” said Prof. Ron Robin, president of the University of Haifa.

The Regional Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research (RADAR) Center of Ben-Gurion University — recognized by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse for its “contributions to scientific diplomacy through outstanding efforts in international collaborative research” – recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Colorado – Anschutz Medical Campus to promote substance-use research, education, training and exchange.

RADAR works with international governmental agencies including the US Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, US Agency for International Development (USAID), United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Initiative, and universities worldwide.

RADAR is starting collaborations with the University of Malta, Chiang Mai University, and universities in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Vladivostok to study attitudes, beliefs and knowledge among medical and allied healthcare students regarding medical cannabis.

The Weizmann Institute of Science and Institut Curie in Paris recently signed an historic partnership to work closely together to improve knowledge in the life sciences, particularly in physics, chemistry and cancer research.

Innovation and entrepreneurship

Israel is, of course, famous for its startup smarts, and some recent academic partnerships leverage that expertise.

IBM’s Alpha Zone partnered with Hadassah University Medical Center of Jerusalem to establish an accelerator for post-seed Israeli startups developing deep-tech solutions and services in digital medicine.

Tel Aviv University was chosen as the only foreign founding partner of a new innovation and entrepreneurship hub in Chicago focusing on research, education and startup creation in the fields of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, big data and food security.

Tel Aviv University and Yissum, the tech-transfer company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, are partners with the University of Illinois, University of Chicago and Northwestern University in the new $500 million Discovery Partners Institute, supported by the State of Illinois and the city of Chicago.

Discovery Partners Institute will facilitate academic and industry collaboration, with the initial focus on entrepreneurship, biosciences, computer science including AI, big data and cybersecurity, as well as food and agricultural technologies.

Yissum also is opening centers of international cooperation in Asunción (Paraguay) and Shenzhen (China) to facilitate regional commercialization of early-stage technologies coming out of the university’s research labs. Yissum CEO and President Yaron Daniely said additional international centers of cooperation are in the pipeline.

Nanosynex is an Israeli startup working on a novel approach to help physicians prescribe the correct antibiotic for each case.

Article by Brian Blum, published on Israel21c on April 3, 2019.

The rise of so-called “superbugs” is reaching epidemic levels. Today, nearly 700,000 people around the world die not from the illness for which they went to the doctor or a hospital but from an infection resulting from contact with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

In the United States alone, 2 million patients contract infections from superbugs; 23,000 people die from those infections. Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill estimates that by the year 2050, more people will die from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections than from cancer.

One of the ways superbugs develop is when a patient is prescribed the wrong antibiotics. The bacteria “learn” from that incorrect treatment and can share their newfound resistance with other bacteria.

“The body becomes an incubator for resistant bacteria,” explains Diane Abensur Bessin, CEO of Nanosynex, an Israeli startup working on a novel approach to help physicians avoid mis-prescribing antibiotics.

“If we give a patient the correct treatment at the right dose, then no resistance will be created, the patient will be cured faster, and other patients won’t be infected by resistant bacteria,” Abensur Bessin tells ISRAEL21c.

Nanosynex’s solution is a diagnostic test that determines which bacteria in a patient’s body are resistant to which antibiotics – all in just four hours. That compares favorably with the day or two or more required for traditional diagnostic tests. The result: physicians can more quickly prescribe the antibiotics that will work.

This will entail some change in behavior among doctors, who tend to prescribe a broad-based treatment rather than taking blood or urine and waiting for results. It’s not that physicians are in cahoots with the bad bacteria; their patients come in suffering and doctors want to provide fast relief.

“But every minute counts when you’re dealing with resistant bacteria,” Abensur Bessin tells ISRAEL21c. If you don’t get your test results back for a couple of days, it may already be too late to stop resistance from developing.

Antibiotic overprescribing is a particular problem in primary care, where it’s viruses – not bacteria – that cause most infections. About 90 percent of all antibiotic prescriptions in the US are issued by general practitioners.

Nanosynex is creating a kit that will be sold to laboratories; it contains disposable cards, a fluorescent reading device and software to do the analysis.

The technology is based on “microfluidic” features, requiring a smaller quantity of bacteria than other testing technologies, Abensur Bessin explains. The sample is mixed with a fluorescent dye; the intensity of the fluorescent signal is proportional to any bacterial growth.

Abensur Bessin came up with the idea for Nanosynex along with her co-founder, Brazilian native Michelle Heyman, while both were studying for their MBAs at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The two approached the university’s technology transfer office and asked which researchers had technologies that were mature enough to be turned into a company.

“We met with five different professors,” Abensur Bessin tells ISRAEL21c. “We wanted something that had a short time-to-market – five years or less.”

That’s how the two were introduced to Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, dean of the Technion’s biomedical-engineering faculty. Levenberg and her team had already been working for several years on the microfluidic “chip” that would become the basis of the Nanosynex kit.

Paris-born Abensur Bessin was particularly interested in identifying a medical technology to build a company around. Her father has a firm in France that distributes diagnostic tools across Europe. With the marketing channels already in place, Levenberg’s invention was a match.

“We knew there was a huge potential,” Abensur Bessin says. “There was no debate on the need to create this.”

Nanosynex incorporated in 2017 and has raised $1 million with another $500,000 pledged from the Israel Innovation Authority. The five-person company is operating out of the Technion’s in-house accelerator but will be moving to its own offices soon.

In 2018, Nanosynex was one of 10 companies accepted into IBM’s Tel Aviv-based accelerator for healthcare startups. The company receives blood for testing from Rambam Healthcare Campus in Haifa and Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. The head of Rambam’s microbiology department is on Nanosynex’s scientific advisory board.

Abensur Bessin says when Nanosynex results were compared with those from existing diagnostic devices, “they were exactly the same but done in half the time.”

Slowing the rise of the superbugs is just the start of what Abensur Bessin hopes will be a “long-lasting business that will grow internationally.”

In the meantime, if your doctor tells you to wait a few hours before he or she prescribes an antibiotic, don’t become too anxious: it will be for the good of your health — and the wellbeing of the entire planet.

Nanosynex’s microfluidic array. Photo: courtesy