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Technion students and professors set aside lectures, books, and exercises for a day, as startup founders, multinationals and VC investors flock to campus to talk entrepreneurship.

Students and professors at Haifa’s Technion — Israel Institute of Technology set aside their lectures, books and exercises for one day last week, as startup founders, multinationals’ officials, and VC investors from the nation’s thriving tech field flocked to the campus, located on Mount Carmel, to talk about entrepreneurship.

Article published at www.timesofisrael.com on December 25, 2019.

Technion students faced with challenges of entrepreneurship at the Technion, December 19, 2019. (Courtesy)

During the day, students and faculty members huddled at tables around hackathons that aimed to try to find a solution to pressing problems like building site accidents, traffic jams and road crashes, and health challenges, while officials from tech giants operating in Israel, including Facebook, Intel Corp. and IBM.

Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, a Technion graduate, kicked off the day talking about how behavioural economics can change the world and how to motivate people.

Kfir Damari, the co-founder of SpaceIL spoke about how the startup tried and failed, to reach the moon with their Beresheet spacecraft; Dor Gross of Facebook talked to students about how to Crush their Coding Interview while entrepreneurs from Israeli firms like Mellanox Technologies Ltd. and startups like Taboola talked about how to succeed, grow a firm, and make an exit.

Former Intel Israel President Mooli Eden, left to right; Lena Levine, the co-founder of Via Surgical; Yossi Vardi; Gal Haber, co-founder and managing director of Plus500 Ltd; Dov Moran speak in a panel at entrepreneurship day at the Technion Dec. 19, 2019 (Courtesy)

“Which one of you wants to be a startup entrepreneur,” called out tech guru Yossi Vardi to a hall full of students during a panel. A bunch of hands went up in the room. “Which of you have a mother who want you to set up a startup,” Vardi asked, immediately after. This time, hands remained down.

Vardi was part of a panel together with former Intel Israel President Mooli Eden, Dov Moran, the inventor of the disk on key, and Gal Haber, co-founder and managing director of Plus500 Ltd., the maker of an online trading platform, and Lena Levine, the co-founder of Via Surgical, which has developed a medical device to perform sutures in hernia-repair surgeries in a minimally invasive way. All of the participants of the panel were themselves Technion graduates, and they debated the future of the so called Startup Nation and provided words of wisdom to entrepreneurs in the making.

“Make sure you have the right people,” to join your venture, was one of the nuggets — employ people who are modest, not big spenders and don’t have huge egos; finding a mentor to save growth pains of the company was another piece of advice, along with “follow your passion”, as trends come and go; creating a successful startup requires also a bit of luck — so make you are “not sitting on the toilet” when luck comes knocking at your door, was another golden insight. The pros and cons of joining a startup — or setting up your own — or joining the ranks of a large multinational were also debated, with opinions swinging both ways.

Ezri Tarazi, professor of industrial design in charge of the t-hub entrepreneurship program of the Technion, December 19, 2019. (Shoshanna Solomon/Times of Israel)

The day was organized by the Technion’s “t-hub,” a program set up earlier this year, as part of a national plan to boost entrepreneurship at Israeli colleges and universities.

“We want to create the appetite, the spark,” said Ezri Tarazi, a professor of industrial design in charge of the program and of the entrepreneurship day. “Besides studies, academic institutions must provide the spark of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Organizations globally today understand that “innovation is an engine” without which they cannot grow, Tarazi said, and those who do not keep up with the pace, cannot survive.

Entrepreneurship can be taught, he added. “Talent can be developed,” he said. “It takes awareness and exercise.” Rather than studying events in the past and how they were resolved, he said, studying innovation focuses on finding solutions to challenges that to date have no answers. “Even the teachers don’t know how to solve the problem,” he said.

Technion students taking a break on the grass on a sunny winter day when entrepreneurs flocked to the Haifa campus to talk to students, December 19, 2019. (Shoshanna Solomon/Times of Israel)

In Israel, which boasts the greatest number of startups per capita in the world, and sports the nickname Startup Nation, entrepreneurship courses have been sprouting at universities and colleges throughout the country to meet a grassroots demand. These programs aim to arm students with much-needed theory along with a toolbox of mentorships, networking, and tips on how best to approach investors for funding.

The Technion was one of the first universities to recognize this need, Tarazi explained, with Nobel Prize winner Professor Dan Shechtman, world-renowned for his work in chemistry and material science, setting up and running a course on technological entrepreneurship at the Technion for the past 30 years. Now there is a push to deepen these activities, Tarazi said.

The aim of the t-hub is to hold these kinds of days, workshops, and lectures on a regular basis, so that the university not only provides students with the “hard skills” – the deep scientific knowledge they glean from their lectures and classes, but also with soft-skills, like how to write a CV, pitch to an investor, work in a team and how to interview to make it in an ever-changing new world.

The hackathon about behavioral economics held by Dan Arieli at the Technion, December 22, 2019. (Courtesy)

The university will also be launching, next October, a minor degree in entrepreneurial leadership that can be added to a variety of majors, he said.

Meanwhile, at the construction hackathon, students in hard hats suggested putting up sensors at risky spots on construction sites to help avoid accidents. In the Dan Ariely’s behavioural economics hackathon, students suggested adding a feature to navigation app Waze to alert drivers about bikers on the road, while another group suggested cutting traffic by creating work-sharing spaces on trains, to get entrepreneurs to drop their cars and hop on the wagons.

Luna Karayanni, a 20-year-old second-year computer sciences student was walking around the campus with her friends, taking a break from sessions. She had attended the Crushing your Coding Interview session earlier that morning, she said. The key takeaways she gleaned from the talk were that people need to be honest about their capabilities, and must highlight any significant projects they took part in while studying. She also attended the talk by the SpaceIL co-founder and said it was “inspirational, and very emotional.”

Luna Karayanni, a 20-year-old second-year computer sciences student at the Technion, left, together with Mais Haddad, her 20-year old friend, who studies bio-medical engineering, and Sabri Asssaf, a 20-year-old bioengineering student, at the Technion campus in Haifa’ December 19, 2019. (Shoshanna Solomon/Times of Israel)

Mais Haddad, her 20-year old friend, who studies bio-medical engineering, said that she also found the SpaceIL talk “motivational” — SpaceIL co-founder Damari urged the students “to believe in ourselves and be good at what we do,” she said. Taking part in the day’s activities was important, she said. “As students, we may know how to get good marks, but we don’t always know how to cope in the workplace.”

Twenty-six year old Idan, who preferred not to give his surname, said that he took part in the talk by Dan Ariely, and then attended the panel with Vardi and the other entrepreneurs. “It’s been an Achla day,” he said, using an Arab word for “awesome.”

“Instead of just studying we have been given many talks and a wide choice,” he said. “It has been interesting.”

Technion researchers have developed an inexpensive, environmentally friendly and safe hydrogen production technology. A start-up called H2Pro is now working on commercialising this revolutionary discovery.

The prestigious Harvey Prize for science and technology was awarded at Technion in early November to Profs. Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna and Feng Zhang, who developed the groundbreaking genetic editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, and to Prof. Christos H. Papadimitriou, a founding father of algorithmic game theory.

Scott Leemaster of Franklin, Michigan is the new chair of the Technion Board of Governors. He assumed the post
in June during the Board’s annual meeting, succeeding long-time chair Lawrence Jackier.

Read here for the latest from the Technion.

Last night at the Churchill Awards Dinner at The Biltmore Hotel in Mayfair with 280 curious minds gathered to celebrate the achievements of The Technion, the leading science university of Israel.

The evening started with Professor Alon Wolf, the Vice President talking about the latest innovations and discoveries by the scientists and researchers working hard to make our world a better place.

Later in the evening, Lord Robert Winston received with the Churchill Award for his achievements in the field of fertility and genetics and for his strong commitment to Technion and the State of Israel. Winston Churchill, who was a huge supporter and fan of Israel and the Technion.

The main speaker was Brigadier General Professor Jacob Nagel who has had served as the Head of Israels National Security Council. Professor Nagel explained what Technion has been doing as a major contribution to the nation’s security. He told the audience about the current situation and balance, mentioning Hezbollah gaining strength and building munition programs, about the escalation of tension in Gaza and West Bank, the continuing negative approach towards Israel in Europe. Professor Nagel talked about the question of what will happen with ISIS after Syria, about the political changes in the USA and about the Turkish-Kurd tension but the three most pressing concerns are IRAN, IRAN, IRAN.
The nuclear deal of Iran gives it a clear path to enriched uranium, ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Professor Nagel also informed the audience about his and his researchers work at the Technion. Their development of the “Arrow” of “David Sling” and of the “Iron Dome”. He also mentioned the Space and Satellite program; the cybersecurity/data science; lasers; image analysis; robotics and many – many more.
He reminded us that “We, Israelis live in a jungle. The weak can’t survive in the Middle East”
The evening ended on a very high note with a room full of energy.

If you are interested in watching the recorded video of the speeches of the night, please contact the office on info@technionuk.org

The FIRST robotics team, which operates under the aegis of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, won a silver medal at the competition that featured 191 teams, representing 191 countries.

Read more on JNS.org.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis host the Israeli robotics team that participated in the First Global Challenge robotics olympiad in Dubai, Nov. 6, 2019. Credit: Kobi Gideon/GPO.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis welcomed the Israeli robotics team—students from the Megiddo Regional High School, who participated in the First Global Challenge robotics Olympiad in Dubai—at the prime minister’s residence on Wednesday.

The FIRST robotics team, which operates under the aegis of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, won a silver medal at the competition that featured 191 teams, representing 191 countries.

The Israeli team reached the finals and won silver after finishing the preliminary stages with the highest points ranking. It also won a special prize for its assistance to other groups.

Netanyahu congratulated team members, who showed him their medal-winning robot, on their achievements in the competition.

“This is truly a great honour for the State of Israel. You were in Dubai, which is not coincidental,” said Netanyahu. “This represents what is above the water.”

“There are, of course, currents under the water that occur, and which occur, inter alia, because of this,” he continued. “You went there with robotics and technology, but the reason why the State of Israel has forged ties with many countries in the first place is because we have technologies and capabilities against a common enemy in both the security and civilian spheres. What you have done here is another step in this process, and it is not bad at all.”

Congratulations to Nobel Laureate for Physics in 2019 Prof. James Peebles. Jim Peebles won the Technion Israel Harvey Prize in 2001. The Harvey Prize is known to be a strong precursor and indicator of Nobel quality!
Peebles is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading theoretical cosmologists, with major theoretical contributions to primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.

Read more on Wikipedia.org.

Nobel Laureate Prof. James Peebles, Source: Wikipedia.org

Researchers from the Technion Faculty of Biology may have found a way to make salmonella bacterial infections less aggressive by inhibiting the formation of biofilm, a layer of microorganisms that constitutes a serious medical and environmental problem because it protects bacteria and enables them to attach to tissues, medical devices, pipes and more.

The discovery by Associate Professor Meytal Landau, doctoral student Nir Salinas, and the laboratory research team could lead to the development of innovative treatments that will inhibit the antibiotic resistance of virulent bacteria.

Article by Kevin Hattori published at www.ats.org on September 13, 2019.

Associate Professor Meytal Landau and Mr. Nir Salinas

In 2017, Prof. Landau’s research team published an article in Science describing new discoveries about Staphylococcus aureus—an especially virulent bacterium that has become resistant to many types of antibiotics and that is responsible for a considerable number of infections in hospitals and in the community. The researchers discovered that this bacterium, which attacks the organism’s T-cells of the immune systems, does so in part by means of secreting certain fibrils. These toxic fibrils resemble amyloids, proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, but differ from them structurally. In an article published in Nature Communication in 2018, Nir Salinas and his colleagues on the research team revealed their discovery that proteins from the same family as the toxic fibrils produce exceptionally stable amyloid structures that can survive under extremely difficult conditions and protect the bacteria. Prof. Landau expressed the hope that these discoveries will lead to new treatments that will impair the fibrils and significantly diminish the aggressively virulent infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus.

In a recent study in PLoS Pathogens, the Technion researchers suggested that by interfering with amyloid fibrils produced by E. coli and Salmonella, bacteria often linked with contaminated water or food, they can hamper the bacteria’s defense mechanisms and their ability to attach to tissues and medical devices. This is accomplished by repurposing substances that have already undergone clinical trials for treating Alzheimer’s. The major advantage of this repurposing is that the approval process is much shorter and less expensive than in the case of a new compound.

The substances tested on Salmonella bacteria do not harm the bacteria directly. Instead, they damage the biofilm, the resilient layer that protects bacteria from substances that pose a danger to them, including antibiotic drugs. The researchers estimate that this approach of impairing the biofilm will reduce the risk of developing resistance compared to antibiotics that kill the bacterial and thereby induce defense mechanisms against the drug, making the bacteria more resilient and virulent.

The research examined the possibility of damaging Salmonella and E. coli bacteria found in contaminated food. Nevertheless, the researchers hope their discovery will also be effective in battling other bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus. In his ongoing doctoral research, Mr. Salinas will focus on developing stable antibacterial substances and on examining small molecules that will interfere with the in-vitro assembly of amyloids in bacteria. He hopes these developments will accelerate the crucial battle against the development of virulent strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Left: Atomic structure of a segment from a protein that forms fibrils that structure the biofilm of E. coli and Salmonella bacteria. This structure is highly similar to that of the amyloid fibrils related to Alzheimer’s disease, and this structural similarity inspired the idea of harming the bacterial biofilm fibrils using substances developed to combat Alzheimer’s fibrils. Top (black and white): Micrographs taken with an electron microscope. The left image shows fibrils produced by bacterial proteins that serve to build the biofilm; the right image shows impairment in the formation of the fibrils as a result of adding the substance developed to combat Alzheimer fibrils (ANK6). Bottom (black and red): Three-dimensional images taken by a confocal laser scanning microscope after coloring the bacterial biofilm in fluorescent red. Left: High biofilm biomass. Right: Addition of ANK6 leads to a significant decrease in the amount of biofilm.

The research is being carried out in collaboration with the Institute for Complex Systems in Jülich and in Düsseldorf, Germany. The Technion Center for Structural Biology (TCSB), the Lorry Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering, the Electron Microscopy Center, and the Center for Electron Microscopy of Soft Matter in the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI) also provided assistance for this project.

Associate Professor Landau joined the Technion faculty after completing post-doctoral studies at UCLA, where she specialized in X-ray micro-crystallography of amyloids associated with Alzheimer’s disease. In September 2012 she founded her laboratory in the Faculty of Biology at the Technion.

Mr. Nir Salinas completed his bachelor’s degree in molecular biochemistry in the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion. Today he is following a direct program to a doctoral degree in the Faculty of Biology.

Breakthrough at the Technion: Researchers have developed an inexpensive, environmentally friendly and safe hydrogen production technology.

The E-TAC water-splitting technology facilitates an unprecedented energetic efficiency of 98.7% in the production of hydrogen from water and has other key advantages over water electrolysis. A startup company, H2Pro, was founded based on this development and is working on its commercialization.

Article published at www.technion.ac.il on September 15, 2019.

Group photo (L-R) : Dr. Hen Dotan , Avigail Landman , Prof. Avner Rothschild and Prof. Gideon Grader.
Credit: Chen Galili, Technion Spokesperson Department

Researchers at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology have developed an innovative, clean, inexpensive, and safe technology for producing hydrogen. The technology significantly improves the efficiency of hydrogen production, from ~75% using current methods to an unprecedented 98.7% energy efficiency. The researchers’ finding were recently published in Nature Energy.

The Technion researchers developed a unique process based on a cyclic process in which the chemical makeup of the anode (the electrode where the oxidation process takes place) changes intermittently. In the first stage, the cathode (the electrode where the reduction takes place) produces hydrogen by reducing water molecules while the anode changes its chemical composition without producing oxygen. In the second stage, the cathode is passive while the anode produces oxygen by oxidizing water molecules. At the end of the second stage, the anode returns to its original state and the cycle begins again. This innovative process, called E-TAC water splitting (Electrochemical – Thermally-Activated Chemical water splitting), decouples the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions. Based on this technology, the researchers founded H2Pro, a startup company working on converting the technology to a commercial application.

The research, part of the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP), was conducted by Professor Avner Rothschild of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Gideon Grader of the Faculty of Chemical Engineering, together with Dr. Hen Dotan and Avigail Landman, a doctoral student under the joint supervision of Prof. Grader and Prof. Rothschild.

Enormous amounts of hydrogen are produced annually worldwide: ~65 million tons valued at ~130 billion dollars, with a total energy of ~ 9 exajoules (EJ), the equivalent of ~2,600 teraWatts per hour (TWh). These amounts are constantly increasing and are expected to triple over the next 20 years. Hydrogen consumption is expected to reach 14 exajoules by 2030 and 28 exajoules by 2040.

About 53% of the hydrogen produced today is used to produce ammonia for fertilizers and other substances, 20% is used by refineries, 7% is used in methanol production and 20% serves other uses. In the future, hydrogen is expected to serve additional applications, some of which are in accelerated stages of development: hydrogen as fuel for fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV), fuel for storing energy from renewable energy sources for grid balancing and power-to-gas (P2G) applications, industrial and home heating, and more.

About 99% of the hydrogen produced today originates in fossil fuels, mainly by extraction from natural gas (SMR). This process releases ~10 tons of CO2 for every ton of hydrogen and that is responsible for ~2% of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. The presence of considerable amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere accelerates global warming. This explains the urgent need for cleaner and more environmentally friendly alternatives for hydrogen production.

Currently, the primary alternative for clean hydrogen production without CO2 emissions is water electrolysis. This process entails placing two electrodes, an anode and a cathode, in alkaline- or acid-enriched water to increase electrical conductivity. In response to passing an electrical current between the electrodes, the water molecules (H2O) are broken down into their chemical elements, such that hydrogen gas (H2) is produced near the cathode and oxygen (O2) is produced near the anode. The entire process takes place in a sealed cell divided into two compartments. Hydrogen is collected in one part and oxygen in the other.

“Water splitting” – illustration. In the ETAC process, water is split into hydrogen and oxygen in two separate steps at a high efficiency of 98.7%. (Credit: Tom Kariv)

Clean hydrogen production entails a series of technological challenges. One of these is the significant loss of energy. Today the energetic efficiency of electrolysis processes is only 75%, and this means high electricity consumption. Another difficulty is related to the membrane that divides the electrolytic cell into two. This membrane is essential for collecting the hydrogen on one side and the oxygen on the other, yet it limits the pressure in the electrolytic cell to 10-30 atmospheres, while most applications require hundreds of atmospheres of pressure. For example, fuel cell electric vehicles use compressed hydrogen at 700 atmospheres. Today this pressure is increased by means of large and expensive compressors that complicate operation and increase system installation and maintenance costs. In addition, the presence of the membrane complicates the assembly of the production apparatus, significantly raising its price. Moreover, the membrane requires periodic maintenance and replacement.

The E-TAC technology has several significant advantages over electrolysis:

1. Absolute chronological separation between hydrogen production and oxygen production, with the two processes occurring at different times. Consequently:
a. The membrane separating the anode from the cathode in the electrolytic cell is no longer necessary. This represents a substantial savings over electrolysis: the membrane is expensive, complicates the production process and requires high purity water and ongoing maintenance to prevent it from fouling.
b. It eliminates the risk of a volatile encounter between oxygen and hydrogen. Such an encounter is liable to occur in ordinary electrolysis if the membrane ruptures or its seal is broken.
c. Currently, the use of membranes limits the pressure in hydrogen production. The technology developed at the Technion renders the membrane unnecessary, thus facilitating hydrogen production under much higher pressure, thus eliminating some of the high costs of compressing the hydrogen later.

2. In the new process, oxygen is produced via a spontaneous chemical reaction between the charged anode and the water, without using an electrical current at that point. This reaction eliminates the need for electricity during oxygen production and increases energetic efficiency from 75% using customary methods to an unprecedented 98.7% efficiency.

3. The E-TAC technology is expected not only to lower operating costs but also equipment costs. H2Pro estimates that the cost of equipment to produce hydrogen using E-TAC will be about half the cost of equipment used in existing technologies.

Electrolysis was discovered more than 200 years ago and since then has undergone a cumulative series of individual improvements. Currently the Technion researchers are proposing a disruptive change in concept that they believe will lead to less expensive, clean and safe hydrogen production. They also believe the new process is likely to generate a revolution in hydrogen production based upon clean and renewable energy such as solar energy or wind power.

Initial assessments indicate that it will be possible to produce hydrogen on industrial scales at competitive production costs compared to production from natural gas via SMR and, as noted, without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere.

The developers of the technology—Prof. Gideon Grader, Prof. Avner Rothschild and Dr. Hen Dotan—joined together with the founders of the Viber company to establish H2Pro, a company working on commercializing this new technology. Located in the Caesarea Industrial Park, the company was given an exclusive license by the Technion to commercialize the product and to date has raised ~$5 million in a campaign led by Hyundai. H2Pro has more than 20 employees, most of them Technion graduates.

The research is supported by the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP), the Ed Satell gift for Nitrogen-Hydrogen Alternative Fuels (NHAF), the Adelis Foundation, the Ministry of Energy, and the European Commission (EU Horizon 2020 Framework Programme).

Israeli startup DermaDetect offers users super-fast, AI-based diagnosis for hundreds of skin conditions from the comfort of their own phones.

Article by Naama Barak published on www.israel21c.org on August 19, 2019.

DermaDetect enables to diagnose skin conditions using a dedicated, AI-based app. Photo by Vulp via Shutterstock.com

Let’s say your child has a weird skin rash. What do you do? Head to the local clinic and wait for hours until a doctor examines your child for exactly 20 seconds before prescribing medication. A day truly well-spent. Not.

One parent who had enough of this waiting game is Israeli entrepreneur Eugene Dicker. A few years ago, a single spot appeared on his daughter’s face. They spent the obligatory time waiting for a doctor who prescribed medication, but the condition worsened and even after consulting with another doctor spots appeared over most of her body.

Exasperated with the time wasted, Dicker phoned dermatology specialist Prof. Arieh Ingber, who proceeded to ask him a couple of questions before correctly diagnosing his daughter.

“When all that happened over the phone, the penny dropped,” Dicker recounts. He realized that visuals aren’t the only channel for diagnosis and that he could translate the over-the-phone questioning to computerized Q&A – a move that could provide patients with correct diagnoses without going to the doctor.

Shortly afterwards, he joined forces with Ingber and two other doctors, and the startup DermaDetect was born.

DermaDetect analyzes both photos and patients’ information to provide diagnosis that overcomes the need for physical examination by a doctor. Photo by Evgeniy Kalinovskiy via Shutterstock.com

“Our goal is to enable people to diagnose skin diseases using a smartphone,” he explains.

Patients use the DermaDetect app to take a photo of the skin lesion and answer a few questions before receiving either a treatment or management plan.

“You might have a mosquito bite that you scratched and is now bleeding, and you’ll get a treatment plan,” Dicker explains. “However, if we reach the conclusion that you have advanced psoriasis that usually can’t be immediately treated, you’ll receive a management plan.”

Intelligent system

The questions posed to users are intelligent, in the sense that they follow up one another based on the answers already given.

“For example, if you choose an area of the lesion that can’t have hair loss, we won’t ask you about hair loss,” Dicker says. “The artificial intelligence knows how to analyze the information both from the photograph and the patient’s answers. That’s our uniqueness.”

This artificial intelligence (AI) analysis is based on a deep learning process, which has involved gathering information from health systems and clinics around the world for the past two years.

If the thought of leaving your health in the hands of AI scares you, worry not.

“At the end of this process, all this data is conveyed in an automatic, anonymous and encrypted manner to specialist skin doctors [who] approve or disapprove the results of the diagnosis – just like Tinder — in less than 30 seconds,” Dicker explains.

“If they approve, the result is immediately transmitted back to the patient’s app,” he says. If the doctor doesn’t approve, the diagnosis reaches a panel of several other doctors who decide on the case within 72 hours.

DermaDetect strives to make your dermatologist’s waiting room a distant memory. Photo by Sopotnicki via Shutterstock.com

This process, Dicker stresses, enables quick and professional diagnosis at a time when waiting times are soaring due to a growing shortage of clinical dermatologists, while skin conditions are becoming more prevalent due to stress, air pollution and food pollution.

“These two trends are clashing, and that’s why waiting times for dermatologists are getting longer around the world,” he says.

DermaDetect, now in the midst of its second round of funding, is in the process of receiving its CE certification and expects to receive FDA approval by the end of the year. For the past six months, it has been operating a pilot in Israel in the field of pediatric skin conditions and is about to begin cooperating with a local HMO.

“Our goal for the health system is to eventually bring to the clinic only the cases that need a clinic,” Dicker says. “Most people don’t need to go to the clinic because their problem can be diagnosed from afar.”

The solution DermaDetect offers is unique, according to Dicker. Unlike some competitors, it only requires users to take one or two photos of a small area of the body, rather than full-body scans. And it offers diagnoses for around 350 skin conditions. It doesn’t focus on skin cancers, Dicker explains, because cancerous lesions must be examined at a clinic.

One top of that, he adds, is the app’s unique capability to combine information from photo analysis and information from the patient. The company doesn’t hold onto or even see the patients’ data; the only people privy to users’ information are the doctors at the end of the process.

That’s why, for example, Dicker can’t divulge the most common skin conditions the app deals with, only saying that they belong to the field of common acute dermatology, meaning non-chronic conditions.

“We as a company don’t see the information about the cases and the patients. The only person to directly see it is the doctor.”

Summer skin tips

At ISRAEL21c’s request, DermaDetect offered some skin-protection tips ahead of the scorching summer.

Their experts’ top tip was to avoid spending too much time in the sun and to make sure to drink plenty of water.

They also recommend using high SPF protection on all areas exposed to the sun – ears, noses and even scalps for those of us with a little less hair on top.

Wearing wide-brimmed hats is also a good idea, they say, as well as long and dark-colored clothes because dark materials provide a higher ultraviolet protection factor (UPF). The ideal level of protection is UPF 50+, and the average white tee offers a meager UPF 15+.

Israel’s Council for Higher Education announced a plan to invest $27 million into a five-year “New Campus Vision” plan at 10 top universities.

Article published on JNS on July 16, 2019.

The University of Haifa. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE), the government agency overseeing colleges and universities just unveiled “The New Campus Vision,” aiming to expose students and faculty from all disciplines to the worlds of entrepreneurship and innovation. The initiative also seeks to get Israel’s campuses on par with other nations, especially the United States, where many colleges and universities have long-established centers for entrepreneurship and innovation.

The Israeli plan intends to change the face of the Israeli campus to one that fosters an Innovative work environment of creativity and collaboration; breaks down barriers across all disciplines, as well as between students and faculty, so that students become entrepreneurial learners; and promotes multidisciplinary brainstorming and collaboration between students and researchers.

The $27.7 million project will be put into place over five years at 10 select colleges and universities from Israel’s north to south, including Hebrew University, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and Azrieli College of Engineering, all in Jerusalem; Tel Aviv University, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, and Afeka Academic College of Engineering, all in Tel Aviv; The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Haifa University, both in Haifa; ORT Brauda College of Engineering in Karmiel; Tel Hai College in the Galilee; the Holon Institute of Technology in Holon; Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva; Sapir Academic College in Sderot; and Ariel University in Ariel.

“The New Campus vision seeks to promote the concept of innovation, create an entrepreneurial culture, and change the face of the academic campus,” said chairperson of the CHE’s Planning and Budgeting Committee Professor Yaffa Zilbershats.

Yaffa Zilbershats. Credit: Israel’s Council for Higher Education.

The new centers will bring in Israel’s leading researchers from across multiple businesses and industries, and feature cutting-edge gatherings like hackathons and meet-ups to stimulate collaboration and creativity.

Students from all parts of campus will be trained in entrepreneurship, said CHE officials, and will work with lecturers, researchers and professional mentors to promote trailblazing ideas and cutting-edge projects that will impact Israeli society and beyond.

“Rapid changes in technology require that academia make the necessary adjustments, and integrate the world of innovation and entrepreneurial thought into every academic institution in Israel,” stated Zilbershats.

The first centers will be organized and go into effect starting in the coming 2019-20 academic year.

Marcelle Machluf, child of a Moroccan immigrant who couldn’t read or write, is looking for investors for what could be a revolutionary tumor drug-delivery platform

Article by Shoshana Solomon, published on Timesofisrael.com on July 8, 2019.

Prof. Marcelle Machluf at her lab in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Courtesy)

When Marcelle Machluf was 16, her chemistry teacher told her she had no chance of succeeding in the field. Little did the teacher know that her student, who used to accompany her Moroccan immigrant mother after school to help her clean offices, would go on to complete postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and then lead the Faculty of Biotechnology at Israel’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Machluf uses chemistry in her work all the time, she said in a recent interview with The Times of Israel. And in her first year of biology studies, which was almost all chemistry, “I excelled in all the classes,” she said with a laugh, sitting in her office adjacent to the lab she runs at the Technion.

Machluf, 56, dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at the Technion, is a globally recognized name in the fields of drug delivery, gene therapy, cellular therapy and tissue engineering. She has published over 60 articles and book chapters, and has seven patents in the process of being registered.

Now, the soft-spoken scientist is on the cusp of perhaps the biggest gamble of her career: the creation of a drug delivery system that she hopes will shrink the deadliest forms of cancer — lung, brain and pancreatic tumors. Animal testing has shown support for her theory, and she is getting ready to take the next step.

The Technion’s Prof. Marcelle Machluf, left, at her lab in Haifa with a lab assistant, June 19, 2019 (Shoshanna Solomon/Times of Israel)

“The technology is ready and is working in animals,” she said. “Now I am setting up a company to prepare it in industrial clinical quantities to start tests on humans.”|

Machluf is in talks with investors to raise the funds needed to do this, and if she succeeds, she expects to start the Phase I clinical trial in three to four years.

In her work, Machluf and her team at the Technion lab use mesenchymal stem cells. These cells, found in all humans, play multiple roles in the body, differentiating into a variety of cell types. They are also hypo-immunologic and thus don’t provoke an immune system reaction when transferred from one person to another.

Previous research has found that these cells help cancerous cells hide from the immune system, allowing the cancers to thrive and grow to a size that makes it impossible for the immune system to later attack.

“These cells have a big role in what we call modulating the inflammatory response, and a tumor is a big inflammation that cannot be cured,” Machluf said. So these cells, which are “good cells” because they can generate bone, cartilage, fat and other cells, play a deathly role in helping tumor cells grow.

Machluf and her team assumed there must be something in their membrane that allows them to communicate with the tumor and allows the tumor to control them.

“Otherwise why do they stick to the area of the tumor and don’t leave?” she said.

It is this assumption that led them to the development of their new drug delivery platform.

As a first step, the researchers separated the membranes from the cells.

“How do you do that? You kill the cell. You render it a ghost,” Machluf said. “You take the cell and you spill out all of its content… so it is now an empty balloon. And you leave only the membrane.”

These cell-less membranes can interact with the tumor cells, but because they are devoid of an inside, they won’t do what the tumor instructs.

The researchers then loaded these empty membranes with cancer drugs for a variety of conditions and injected them into animal patients.

Once injected into the bloodstream, the “nano-ghosts” were able to “identify the tumor, hook to the tumor and deploy their drug into the tumor cells, and the tumor cannot do anything about it,” Machluf said.

An illustration of the nano-ghost cells developed by Technion’s Marcelle Machluf (Courtesy)

Thus was born a drug delivery system which is a “universal carrier” — it can target multiple cancers at different stages with diverse drugs, which it can release solely into the tumors without affecting surrounding tissue.

The trials were done on four types of tumors in animals, including some cancers that are considered untreatable, Machluf said: pancreatic tumors, prostate and breast cancers, and a very severe form of lung cancer.

The results were impressive. The tumors went down in size with just one shot of nano-ghosts filled with the appropriate drugs, Machluf said. “For each tumor we chose the drug. One injection reduced the size of the tumor significantly, I am talking about 80%-85%.”

For the pancreatic tumor, the nano-ghosts carried a drug that rendered the cancer more sensitive to chemotherapy, she said, thus making it more susceptible to treatment.

Now the team is starting to test the nano-ghost theory on brain tumors in animals, she said.

Last year Machluf was selected to light a torch at Israel’s 70th Independence Day Celebration, in acknowledgement that she is behind “one of the sixty most promising technologies ever developed” in Israel.

“Nothing is impossible,” she said at the ceremony. “Only the sky is the limit.”

In 2018, Technion’s Prof. Marcelle Machluf was selected to light a torch at Israel’s 70th Independence Day Celebration, as being behind “one of the sixty most promising technologies ever developed” in Israel (Muki Schwartz)

Machluf immigrated to Israel from Morocco at the age of one with her mother and grandmother. The three lived in Ashdod, in a 48-square meter apartment (517 sq feet); none initially spoke the language. Her mother, a seamstress, earned a living by cleaning offices and schools and Machluf used to go with her to help after school. After her mother was injured, an 11-year-old Machluf did most of the cleaning work, together with her mother’s friend.

Her mother, said Machluf, hadn’t gone to school and couldn’t read or write, but did everything for her family, from painting the walls of their one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment to bringing in an income. “She cooked and she took care of me,” she said. “She always told me: without education you are nothing. You need to pursue an education.”

Prof. Marcelle Machluf, right, with her mother Alice Abitbole (Courtesy)

So Machluf invested a lot of time in her studies, but she was also lucky, she said, because she really loved learning. “You need to have the will. Because if you don’t have the will, even if you have all the means, you can’t force someone to do what they don’t want to do. I had the will; I had the motivation.”

Machluf dreamed of being a doctor, but didn’t get accepted to medical school in Israel. So, she opted for biology studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and soon fell in love with the field and the research lab. She went on to earn a master’s degree and doctorate in biochemical engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a post-doctorate at Harvard.

Being a female researcher was not easy, she said, and being of Mizrahi — or Eastern — origin, when most of academia was dominated by men of Ashkenazi descent, was even more challenging, she said. Ashkenazi Jews have roots in Germany, France and Eastern Europe; Mizrahi Jews come from the Middle East of North Africa.

Poor odds
Climbing up the career ladder is difficult “because a woman has always the conflicts between family and career,” she said. “And always, when someone gives up on their career, it is usually the women to support their husbands.”

Her husband, she said, a driving instructor, was happy to take the backseat and let her forge ahead in her career.

Though Machluf is confident in her nano-ghost theory, she admits it faces a lot of skepticism in the academic, corporate and research world.

Hers is an”outside-the-box approach,” she said, “not the typical system that everyone is studying” to combat cancers.

Current cancer treatments involve radiotherapy and chemotherapy, usually conveyed via intravenous infusion. The cancer drugs that are available can be extremely effective, but they also cause damage to healthy tissues. Targeted drug delivery has thus become a major thrust of recent research, but existing solutions are limited to certain kinds of cancer at particular stages. Hence a universal carrier for targeted drugs, like that proposed by Machluf, would be a major breakthrough in cancer research.

Many drug delivery researchers use polymers or other substances to carry their medications. These do not necessarily target just the cancer, Machluf said.
Her product, she said, would be a new player in the market with the potential to take “a big chunk” of the existing research market.

Colleagues are calling her research “too good to be true,” she said, and pharma giants like Merck and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., to whom she showed her findings, have declined to fund her studies, saying the research is still in very early stages and does not fit their mainstream approach to cancer.

She admits that huge challenges and questions lie ahead. Large numbers of nano-ghosts will have to be produced for the clinical trials, and how the human body will react to these particles is also a huge unknown.

Any side effects in humans will be discovered only during clinical trials, she said. “In animals, we don’t see side effects. It doesn’t accumulate in other organs, it doesn’t have toxicity, it doesn’t affect the body in terms of negative effect. So, I don’t know. We need to wait for clinical trials. ”

The chances of success for a venture like hers are “very low,” she admits. Much depends on funding and on how much you believe in and push the technology, “regardless of the negative feedback that you get.”

Meanwhile, Machluf has licensed the technology from the Technion and is now looking for investors to start her clinical trials. She is negotiating with venture capital funds and a major Technion donor, Ed Sattell, has donated $2 million to Machluf’s research.

If she gets the money she needs, she will work on creating industrial amounts of the product to use for human trials. In parallel, she needs to figure out which cancer she wants to tackle first and with which drug.

To make this decision, she will assemble a committee of oncologists, clinicians, industrial oncologists and pharmacologists to come up with an answer.

She will not have the money to work on parallel cancer conditions, she said. A clinical trial with one kind of tumor and one kind of drug will cost, just for Phase I of three phases, some $3 million.

“Before investors invest more money, they need to believe. I need to show them this evidence… show them that it works” in humans, she said.