Month: October 2015

A study by Professor Eldad Yechiam of the Technion reveals that counter to intuition; information about key dangers actually creates indifference towards them.

Intuitively, it seems that the more information there is about risks, the more careful we are. If we have to choose between a city where life is dangerous and a city where life is safe, we will choose the latter. This intuition is refuted in a new study published in the journal “Nature Climate Change”. The study, conducted by Professor Eldad Yechiam from the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion together with colleagues from England and Australia, reveals that the more information about the danger there is, the more the “appetite for risk” actually prevails. In other words, intense coverage of unusual adverse events may actually bring about a calming effect.

The aforementioned study focused on severe climatic events such as fires, floods and tsunamis. The research question was whether daily information on such events reinforces – or actually weakens – the urge to get away from those places. The test was conducted using a simulation of a “microworld” – a reality in which the participant had to decide which village (out of three) he wanted to live in. Two of the villages were characterized by a better quality of life than the third, but also by a higher probability of earthquakes. The simulation was held in several rounds, in each of these round each participant was given the option to change his decision.

Each participant was exposed to different levels of daily information about the earthquakes in the region – from minimal information about what was happening in his home alone to a “full media report” of what was happening in all the homes. The findings were surprising: the more extensive the information, the greater the participant’s tendency to choose the villages that are more prone to earthquakes.

According to Professor Yechiam, the explanation is simple. “Whenever there’s a rare natural event such as an earthquake, detailed information only emphasizes its rarity, and the person who has to make a decision will choose the dangerous village because it’s a better place in normal times. The good daily routine is perceived as an advantage that outweighs the rare risk, and therefore the person will prefer a good and slightly dangerous life to a safe but not so good life. He knows that if he chooses the safe and bad life he’ll feel like a sucker – because most of the time the detailed information will emphasize the disadvantages of his choice.

This same kind of pattern was found following one of the U.S most famous earthquakes, the Loma-Parieta earthquake that hit Northern California in 1989. The earthquake, widely covered by the media, resulted in homeowners reducing the risk estimate of their home insurance. This might have been because of homeowners’ notion that “earthquakes do not strike in pairs” (which is geographically wrong), or because of media attention. The new study suggests that media attention alone increases appetite for risk in situations of rare hazards. In Professor Yechiam’s estimation, a similar dynamic may appear with reports about  Terrorist attacks. “When I am exposed to full and detailed information from the media, and receive information about a terrorist attack in any given city, I conclude that the situation is calm everywhere else. Moreover, within a short time the event in that city will also become a rare event and I will no longer avoid visiting there.”

This month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month in Israel and around the world. Innovative technology developed at the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering will enable the prediction of cancer metastasis after the appearance of breast cancer. The technology, whose efficacy has been proven in preliminary laboratory-trials, is entering into advanced testing using cells from patients undergoing surgery.

Assistant Professor Daphne Weihs recently achieved a research breakthrough: the unique technology that she developed – a biomechanical method for early detection of metastatic cancer – was approved by the Ethics Committee. This means that the technology that was found to be effective in tests on cell lines will advance to trials with tumor cells collected directly after surgery, in cooperation with Rambam Healthcare Campus.

According to Assistant Professor Weihs, the practical concept is that “during or immediately after a biopsy or surgery on a malignant tumor, the system will enable the medical team to quantitatively evaluate the likelihood of the presence or development of tumor metastases in other organs, and to propose which organ or organs are involved. Such knowledge will make it possible to act at a very early stage to identify and curb these metastases and, moreover, to prevent the primary tumor from metastasizing further.

Cancer is a general name for a wide family of diseases – more than 200 – whose common denominator is that the cell division rate becomes uncontrolled and the cells become immortal. In other words, the cancer mechanism disrupts the normal cell division process and converts it into “wild” and rapid division. Since the cells do not age and do not die, the original, primary tumor expands, invades and takes over more and more nearby tissue. In addition, apart from spreading to its immediate vicinity, a tumor that has become very aggressive “knows” how to send metastases to more distant tissues through the lymph and circulatory systems. Metastases (secondary tumors) are usually more dangerous than the primary tumor because it is difficult to identify them at their inception. When they are detected at an advanced stage, treating them medically is more complicated and the medical prognosis is typically not good.

“In fact, most cancer-related deaths are caused by metastases rather than by the primary tumor, and therefore vast resources are invested in developing methods for early detection of metastases,” explains Assistant Professor Daphne Weihs. “Early detection means timely and more effective treatment. The new approach that we are developing will enable early prediction of the likelihood of the formation of metastases and where in the body their development is probable. This prediction is based on identifying the biomechanics of the primary tumor cells, and does not require us to know the specific genetic makeup of the tumor.”

“Cancer cells have different characteristics from healthy cells, and they strive to penetrate and take over healthy tissue in order to increase the volume into which they can spread. To facilitate this, during their evolution (i.e. during the formation of mutations) cancer cells have developed structural flexibility; based on the characteristics of the healthy tissue, the cells change their own characteristics: shape, internal structure, rigidity and more. By adapting the forces that they apply to the nature of the healthy tissue that they encounter and interact with, they manage to penetrate it. It is interesting to note that the secret of cancer cells is not hardness but rather softness – cancer cells are softer and more flexible than healthy cells, and metastatic cells (cancer cells with the potential for metastasis) are even softer and more flexible. This softness enables the cells to make their way into dense tissue but, at the same time, these soft cells are also adaptable and know how to stiffen and apply considerable force on their environment when they want to penetrate it.

Assistant Professor Weihs has developed a unique process of three-dimensional biomechanical imaging, following a series of studies. “With this system we allow the cells being tested to ‘grip’ the designated gels that simulate the stiffness of healthy tissue. Monitoring the change in the shape of the cells, the internal arrangement inside them, and the forces that they exert on the gel enables us to reveal the differences between metastatic cells and benign cells and to identify the cells’ process of adaptation to changing environments in the body. This is a vital step to the prediction of metastases and their identification in the early stages that allow more effective treatment.”

As stated, following successful trials with the innovative diagnostic tool on human cell lines, the Ethics Committee has approved initial trials in humans. The trials are currently being carried out, in collaboration with Rambam Healthcare Campus. Up to now, the research has focused on breast cancer, and it is now expanding to pancreatic cancer and stomach cancer.

Assistant Professor Daphne Weihs, faculty member at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, earned three degrees at the Technion Faculty of Chemical Engineering. She then did her post-doc at the Department of Pathology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In her post-doc, which was financed by NASA because of its implications for biology and medicine in space conditions, she began to study her current subject: cell mechanics, with an emphasis on cancer cell behavior.

Assistant Professor Weihs is on the list of Israel’s 50 most influential women in 2015 recently published by the newspaper Lady Globes, thanks to her discoveries in the diagnosis of tumor metastasis, which represent a “breakthrough that will save lives in the future.”

The research group headed by Prof. Avi Schroeder from the Technion has been chosen to lead a research study attempting to apply these findings to humans in the hopes of developing new cancer treatments

Prof. Avi Schroeder from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Technion to head pioneering research in cancer treatment, based on the findings of a study led by Dr. Joshua Schiffman of the University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dr. Schiffman’s paper was published on October 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Schiffman and his colleagues studied cancer resistance in elephants. Although the number of cells in the body of an elephant is infinitely greater than the number of cells in a human body, cancer rates found among the elephant population stands at less than 5% as compared with 25% in humans.

Dr. Schiffman and his colleagues identified the most plausible explanation of this phenomenon: the prevalence of a cancer-preventing gene that encodes the protein p53 – elephants harbor roughly 20 copies of the gene in their genome while humans sport only two copies of the p53 gene. “Right now we are focusing on discovering new ways of applying these findings to children and families at high risk for developing cancer,” explains Dr. Schiffman. “We intend to leverage this knowledge derived from nature for the prevention, early diagnosis and treatment of cancer in humans – in order to translate research from bench-to-bedside.”

This is where Prof. Schroeder’s research group from the Technion comes in. Prof. Avi Schroeder, who completed his postdoctoral studies with Prof. Bob Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is developing nanotechnology vehicles that target medicines to diseased tissues within the body, while avoiding healthy ones. “Secondary tumors – or metastatic cancer – are the biggest challenge in fighting tumors,” explains Professor Schroeder. “This is due to the fact that these tumors are small, unpredictable and highly scattered, and attack a patient when their immune system is weak from fighting the primary tumor. The nanoscale vehicles we are developing are capable of locating the diseased tissue and releasing the drugs it is carrying directly at the targeted area.” Now Prof.

Schroeder and his research group will attempt to harness the technology to deliver the p53 gene at its varied forms to cancerous tumors in the human body. Schroeder believes this may be the brink of a revolutionary approach where insights from the animal world contribute to the treatment of human diseases.

Dr. Schiffman said that he welcomes the expanded collaboration with his Technion colleagues and is excited about the research initiative. “Prof. Schroeder is an excellent collaborator who has agreed to help us translate our findings for the benefit of cancer patients. As part of the collaboration between the University of Utah and the Technion we will learn how to implement 55 million years of elephant evolution for high risk cancer patients.”

Prof. Schroeder and his colleagues from the Northern United States raised more than one million dollars for this future study from major American organizations.

Twenty years have passed since the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Yitzhak Rabin wanted to become a water engineer. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Technion in 1990:

“In recognition of his invaluable contribution to the defense of the State of Israel and for his endeavors to strengthen the state of Israel and its image at home and abroad.”

To view on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dXuBVyyNzU0

BizTEC-2015 National Entrepreneurship Competition:

Technion’s Peekaboo Group Wins First Place

The National Entrepreneurship Competition for students ended yesterday with first prize going to the Peekaboo team, which developed technology for non-invasive collection of sterile urine from baby girls.

Innovative technology for the non-invasive collection of sterile urine from baby girls, developed by three students from the Technion, won first prize yesterday at the finals of the BizTEC Entrepreneurship Competition held at Microsoft’s R&D center in Herzliya, Israel. The winning team, Peekaboo, whose members are Janna Tenenbaum-Katan, doctoral student at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, and Lior Har-Shai and Yoel Angel, graduates of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, received a 10,000 prize from the Technion, the main financier of the competition. Second place went to DeepSense, which predicts and helps prevent failures in industrial machines, and third place to SelfLift – a sustainable and inexpensive irrigation solution for “small” farmers. Other technologies that reached the finals: an app for locating products in stores; smartphone-controlled robots; home monitor for pulmonary diseases; a non-invasive cardiac monitor; a system for navigation inside buildings; a laboratory management platform; a smart needle for tumor biopsies; and a wearable system designed to shorten athletes’ recovery time.

The BizTEC Competition was established in 2004 as an internal Technion competition, and is now a countrywide competition open to all students and university graduates in Israel. Since its establishment, BizTEC has “given birth” to over 120 startups, which have raised more than 100 million over the years. Tomer London, BizTEC’s first prize winner in 2009, recently raised 60 million from Google Capital. LifeBond Ltd, first prize winner in 2006, has raised a cumulative total of more than 50 million. And these are just two examples of many.

The winning team, Peekaboo, was born in the Medical 3DS Competition held at the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine on the initiative of Faculty Dean Professor Eliezer Shalev. The team won first place in the competition, thanks to its development of an innovative and simple approach to collecting contamination-free ( sterile ) urine from baby girls, effectively but non invasively. According to Tennenbaum-Katan, the mother of two little girls, “the current collection method is inconvenient for both the child and the parent, and invasive collection is clearly even more unpleasant. Every year 1.8 million baby girls undergo invasive urine collection in the United States alone, and our interviews with medical personnel indicate that our product has significant medical and economic potential, with sales of over 17 million units per year in the US alone.” After the announcement, Tennenbaum-Katan said: “It is very exciting to know that not only do we believe in ourselves, but the judges also believe in us.”

Rafi Nave, head of the Bronica Entrepreneurship Center at the Technion, said yesterday that the Technion attaches great importance to entrepreneurship and therefore invests money and additional resources in its development.

Professor Wayne Kaplan, Technion Executive Vice President for Research, added: “Entrepreneurship on the part of students and faculty is one of our main goals today, and we are promoting it through the business unit (T3), the Bronica Entrepreneurship Center and our accelerators.”

Sasson Yona, chief mentor of the competition, said that working with the students competing in BizTEC is “an extraordinary experience, characterized by motivation, talent and diligence. With entrepreneurship there is no paved road – and each group paves its own road.”

Competition Director Tomer Aharonvitch said: “We started the year with 85 teams, most of them (58%) from the Technion, and we chose the 30 best teams to continue with us in a training and team-building program, accompanied by our partners from industry, with around five mentors for each team. We invite students and alumni of the Technion and other schools to participate in the competition and the training that we provide. We don’t demand royalties or anything else – just a commitment to the project and to the program.”

This year the program was sponsored by the Yigal Arnon law office, the Eyal Bressler patent law office and the Lely agricultural products company. Now they will be joined by Bank Hapoalim. Speakers at yesterday’s event were Tzahi (Zack) Weisfeld, Head of Microsoft’s Global Accelerators Program; Bank Hapoalim CTO Dr. Yoav Intrator; and Professor Shlomo Maital, senior research fellow at the Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research at the Technion.

Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie addressing the new students:

“Throughout its years of its existence, the Technion has been an island of moderation and tolerance towards others. Respect others not only in your daily life on campus, in the classrooms and in the laboratories, but on social networks as well.”

1,900 new students began their studies at the Technion today. At a festive ceremony held to mark the opening of the school year, Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie said: “Today you are taking the first step on a journey of three or four years. At the end of the journey you will join an elite group in Israeli society: Technion alumni. Throughout its years of its existence, the Technion has been an island of moderation and tolerance towards others, a place where secular and religious Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and Circassians of both sexes study, teach and work together in full equality. Today, you are entering today this “nature reserve.” Please take advantage of your stay here to acquire knowledge, learn and succeed in your studies. But also take advantage of your stay to get to know, respect and appreciate those who are different. When you leave here, you can take advantage of these tools not only to set up a startup or develop the app of the future, but also to make the society and country that we live in a better place. Respect others not only in your daily life on campus, in the classrooms and in the laboratories, but on social networks as well, where unrestrained and irresponsible verbal violence contributes to polarization and hostility in Israeli society, and in many cases even leads to physical violence.”

Addressing new students on Orientation Day, the President of the Technion said, “The expectations from you are great. The State of Israel does not possess abundant natural resources and our uniqueness and the secret of our success lie in our ability to nurture and promote the human resource. Thanks to the human resource, the State of Israel was established, and thanks to the human resource, it is thriving and flourishing, despite the difficulties.”

On Sunday, the new students will be joined by students already attending the Technion. In the 2015-6 school year, a total of around 13,000 students will study at the Technion in 17 faculties. They include 9,000 undergraduate students and 4,000 advanced degree students (1,101 of are them doctoral students and the rest are graduate students).

The school year at the Technion begins shortly after the announcement of a new faculty – the Faculty of Science Education and Technology, which operated as a department up to now. One of the Faculty’s flagship programs is Views, in which hundreds of Technion alumni earn an additional bachelor’s degree in Science Education. These students have acquired experience in industry, the IDF and other bodies, and those of them who join the school system enrich it and are already generating a significant change in it.

This year the Technion will host the 29th Space Studies Program (SSP) of the International Space University (ISU).  The program will take place in July and August 2016 at the Technion campus in Haifa and throughout Israel, and will be attended by hundreds of college students from around the world.

This year the Technion is offering several new and unique courses of study, in order to meet the growing need for specialists in innovative fields of science, engineering and architecture. The Faculty of Architecture is offering a new program. The plan, formulated on the basis of changes in the world of architecture in the 21st century, based on two separate degrees: a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture Science (B.Sc) and a Master’s degree in Architecture and Town Planning (M.Arch) with a practical orientation and specialization in four principal streams.

The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine is offering a new scientific program towards a Bachelor’s degree in Medical Science for students with a high weighted average (based on the matriculation exams and the psychometric university entrance exam) who are interested in acquiring in-depth knowledge in the life sciences and medicine.

In addition, the Technion has opened a new Master’s degree program in Automotive Systems Engineering, in light of industry demands for highly skilled graduates. The areas of study include development, design and manufacture of vehicle systems and assemblies for the global automotive industry and the national infrastructure, such as railways and advanced means of transportation.

Artificial lung demonstrates how aerosols move and behave in deepest part of lungs

A life-sized artificial human lung created at the Technion is the first diagnostic tool for understanding in real time how tiny particles move and behave in the deepest part of the human lungs (alveolar tissue). The patented platform could provide a better understanding of the health risks associated with airborne pollution, and be used for the evaluation and design of drugs for the respiratory system. The results were published recently in Scientific Reports.

Inhaled particles (also known as aerosols) are tiny particles that can originate in nature, and from industrial and transportation sources, and which enter the lungs via inhalation. Although they are just a few microns in size, i.e. one hundredth of the size of a grain of sand – increased and prolonged exposure to these particles may interfere with the activity of the body’s organs (including neurons in the brain), and in some cases even lead to the onset of cancers (e.g. lungs).

“This is the first diagnostic tool that enables quantitative monitoring of the dynamics of aerosols at such small scales,” said lead researcher Professor Josue Sznitman, of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering. “It gives us the ability to directly observe airborne particle trajectories and their patterns of deposition in the alveoli in real time.”

Monitoring the movement of aerosols in the respiratory system, and especially how they are deposited in alveolar tissue, has long posed a challenge for researchers. This is due in part to their tiny size, and because their movement is affected by airflow, gravity and other forces. Another factor that makes it hard to map the movement of aerosols is the complex structure of the alveolar tissue, which contains hundreds of millions of tiny air sacs interconnected by dense texture of narrow ducts. For this reason, it is impossible to study the movement of these particles in vivo, and researchers have had to rely on animal-models or computer simulations.

The walls of the artificial lung system provide a realistic simulation of a real human lung. They expand and contract, similar to the actual respiratory system, making it possible to understand the behavior of both ‘bad’ inhaled particles (pollution) and ‘good’ particles that are administered as medication to the alveoli. The model could also reduce the need for animal testing in the study of the respiratory system.

According to its designer and builder Dr. Rami Fishler, also of the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, “the model consists of technologies similar to those used to manufacture computer chips, and comprises a branched network of minute air ducts approximately one-tenth of a millimeter wide, with craters simulating the alveoli.”

For the second time in a row: Technion team wins a gold medal in the international iGEM competition

The Technion team has won a gold medal in the international iGEM competition for the second year in a row. In addition to the medal, the team won the following: first place for Best New Application, and three fifth places in the final – (1) Best Presentation, (2) Best Applied Design and (3) Best New Basic Part.

The Technion team, whose full name is Technion IGEM team 2015, developed a unique solution to prevent baldness, based on research in synthetic biology. This is a substance that is secreted to the scalp from a unique comb and breaks down the hormone that causes male baldness. Unlike existing drugs, which are consumed orally and can cause impotence, the technology developed at the Technion will not have such side effects since it does not involve the ingestion of any substance.

Team leader Professor Roee Amit, from the Technion Department of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, explains: “Our most significant win is for Best New Application Project, i.e. first place in the New Application Project track in which we competed. Reaching the finals, and the achievements that we recorded, also make us very happy.”

Some 2300 students, in 245 teams from all over the world, participated in the competition, which was held in Boston. As stated, this is the second year that the Technion team, which members were 10 students from various departments on campus, has won a gold medal in the competition. The team, which moto is “Be Bold, Not Bald”, spent a year and a half preparing for the current competition, and particularly the past month.

“Competing in an international competition of this magnitude is an extraordinary experience,” says team member Alexey Tomsov.  “The level is high and the challenge is tremendous. You must constantly maintain originality, innovation and high-level research, because you’re competing against hundreds of teams from the world’s leading universities.”

The Technion’s high school team – which is also Israel’s first high school team – did not return empty-handed: it won a silver medal and the Best Modeling prize. This team is made up of students from the President’s Program for Future Scientists and Inventors, which is run by the Harry and Lou Stern Family Science and Technology Youth Center at the Technion.

Technion iGEM team 2015