Month: November 2021

Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan, entrepreneurs, and venture capital industry representatives attended the final event of the BizTEC Entrepreneurship Program at the Technion. Since its establishment in 2004, graduates of the program have raised a total of more than $1 billion

The Defi team, established by Technion students, won first prize and $10,000 in the BizTEC 2021 entrepreneurship competition, which took place in Tel Aviv. The prize was awarded to the team members for the development of a compact, portable defibrillator, which is inexpensive and easy to use.

Sudden cardiac arrest is caused when the heart’s electrical system malfunctions. The heart stops beating properly and its pumping function is “arrested,” or stopped. Automated External Defibrillators (AED) are ambulatory devices designed to automatically analyze the patient’s heart rhythm and, if it is found to be in need for fibrillation, deliver the electric pulse (or “shock”) to the heart in order to restore the normal heart rhythm. Typically, these devices are housed in wall-mounted cases and placed in key locations around offices and public places. Hand-carried AEDs are expensive and difficult to manage because of their size and shape. This is why the Defi team is developing a smaller and more cost-effective alternative to the traditional defibrillator so that more of these life-saving devices can be made available to the public.

The members of the team are Ravit Abel, graduate of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Idan Shenfeld, a graduate of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Engineering in the Rothschild-Technion Program for Excellence, and Alon Gilad, a mechanical engineer studying for his master’s degree in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering. The team was accompanied throughout the accelerator process by Ichilov Hospital’s Chief Information Officer, Eyal Kellner, and the Director of Ichilov’s Cardiovascular Research Center, Professor Yaron Arbel. Several months ago, the team took first place in the iTrek competition, which was held at the Technion and at the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.

Today, the BizTEC Entrepreneurship Program is part of t-Hub, the Technion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, headed by Professor Ezri Tarazi, under the leadership of Ohad Yaniv, who heads the BizTEC accelerator program and startup programs.

The BizTEC program was founded in 2004 to cultivate novice entrepreneurs seeking to develop deep technologies that require interdisciplinary collaboration and in-depth knowledge infrastructure. It provides participating teams with professional guidance from mentors in academia and industry. In the 17 years of the program’s existence, its graduates have founded dozens of active companies that have collectively raised more than $1 billion, including Breezometer, Augmedics, Windward, Houseparty, and Presenso. This year, around 100 teams applied for the program, and of them, 37 were accepted. Eleven teams made it through to the finals and presented their developments to the audience.

The final event was attended by Technion President Professor Uri Sivan, numerous entrepreneurs, and senior representatives of the venture capital industry in Israel, many of them Technion alumni. They included former Minister of Science and Technology and entrepreneur Izhar Shay, Ormat founders Dita and Yehuda Bronicki, entrepreneur Yossi Vardi, Dadi Perlmutter, who served as Executive Vice President of the global Intel Corporation, Playbuzz founder Shaul Olmert, former CEO of Microsoft Israel, Yoram Yaacovi, entrepreneur Dan Vilenski.

Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan opened the event with these words:

“In the past few years we recognized that entrepreneurship is a far broader field than tech entrepreneurship or business entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a state of mind that can be applied in every sphere of the lives of us all and is tightly connected with leadership. In recent years, here at the Technion we developed numerous social entrepreneurship programs, meaning groups of people that go out to the community and use entrepreneurial tools and entrepreneurial thinking to better the community’s condition, working together with the community. I thank Dita and Yehuda Bronicki who support the program, not only materially but also spiritually. Their spirit is instilled in every aspect of the entrepreneurship program.”

“As the Technion’s leading entrepreneurship program, BizTEC well reflects the integration of entrepreneurial leadership as a substantial part of the study experience,” said Prof. Ezri Tarazi, Head of the Technion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center (t-Hub). “It furnishes participants with tools for the assimilation of deep technology in meaningful applications that are connected to the global challenges we face in human health, sustainability and the digital world. This event, hosted by t-Hub and attended by senior members of the Israeli hi-tech industry, is proof of the Technion’s continuing centrality to Israel’s economy.”

“BizTEC is a small, special place that enables teams to come in with just an idea, and in less than six months, acquire all the tools they need to turn it into reality,” said Ohad Yaniv, head of the accelerator program and startup programs. “Starting with building the business model, through validation, creating proof of concept, building a presentation, all the way to the pilot phase, first customer acquisition and even the first investment. Compared to any other accelerator in Israel, and even on an international level, its results are exceptional.”

Two teams took second place: BrainSense, which developed a system that monitors stroke events by identifying changes in brain activity and whose members are Technion students; and Oral Detect, which developed a home system for the early detection of tooth decay and won the BME-Hack Biomedical Engineering Hackathon that took place at the Technion earlier this year.

Third place was taken by Soltrex, a team of Technion graduates that developed a fully autonomous technology for the cleaning and operation of solar panels.

“Sutures? That’s practically medieval!”

It is a staple of science fiction to mock sutures as outdated. The technique has, after all, been in use for at least 5,000 years. Surely medicine should have advanced since ancient Egypt. Professor Hossam Haick from the Wolfson Department of Chemical Engineering at the Technion has finally turned science fiction into reality. His lab succeeded in creating a smart, sutureless dressing that not only binds wounds together, but also wards off infection and reports the wound’s condition directly to doctors’ computers. Their study was published in Advanced Materials.

Current surgical procedures entail the surgeon cutting the human body, doing what needs to be done, and sewing the wound shut – an invasive procedure that damages surrounding healthy tissue. Some sutures degrade by themselves – or should degrade – as the wound heals. Others need to be manually removed. Dressing is then applied over the wound and medical personnel monitor the wound by removing the dressing to allow observation for signs of infection like swelling, redness, and heat.

This procedure is painful to the patient, and disruptive to healing, but it is unavoidable. Working with these methods also means that infection is often discovered late, since it takes time for visible signs to appear and more time for medical staff to come around and see them. In developed countries with good sanitation available, about 20% of patients develop infections post-surgery, necessitating additional treatment and extending  recovery time. The figures and consequences are much worse in developing countries.

How will it work with Prof. Haick’s new dressing?

Prior to beginning a procedure, the dressing – which is very much like a smart band-aid, developed by Prof. Haick’s lab – will be applied to the site of the planned incision. The incision will then be made through it. Following the surgery, the two ends of the wound will be brought together, and within three seconds the dressing will bind itself together, holding the wound closed, similarly to sutures.

From then, the dressing will be continuously monitoring the wound, tracking the healing process, checking for signs of infection like changes in temperature, pH, and glucose levels, and report to the medical personnel’s smartphones or other devices. The dressing will also itself release antibiotics onto the wound area, preventing infection.

“I was watching a movie on futuristic robotics with my kids late one night,” said Prof. Haick, “and I thought, what if we could really make self-repairing sensors?”

Most people discard their late-night cinema-inspired ideas. Not Prof. Haick, who, the very next day after his Eureka moment, was researching and making plans. The first publication about a self-healing sensor came in 2015 (read more about it on the Technion website here). At that time, the sensor needed almost 24 hours to repair itself. By 2020, sensors were healing in under a minute (read about the study by Muhammad Khatib, a student in Prof. Haick’s lab here), but while they had multiple applications, they were not yet biocompatible, that is, not usable in contact with skin and blood. Creating a polymer that would be both biocompatible and self-healing was the next step, and one that was achieved by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Ning Tang.

The new polymer is structured like a molecular zipper, made from sulfur and nitrogen: the surgeon’s scalpel opens it; then pressed together, it closes and holds fast. Integrated carbon nanotubes provide electric conductivity and the integration of the sensor array. In experiments, wounds closed with the smart dressing healed as fast as those closed with sutures and showed reduced rates of infection.

“It’s a new approach to wound treatment,” said Prof. Haick. “We introduce the advances of the fourth industrial revolution – smart interconnected devices – into the day-to-day treatment of patients.”

Prof. Haick is the head of the Laboratory for Nanomaterial-based Devices (LNBD) and the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the Technion.

Dr. Ning Tang was a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Haick’s laboratory and conducted this study as part of his fellowship. He has now been appointed an associate professor in Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The academic year has begun, and the campus is bustling with activity – from boosting human health research, to inaugurating a new sports arena, and much more.

The 2021-22 academic year opened on October 24, 2021. This year, we welcomed 2,000 new students, who bring our student body to approximately 15,000 students in 17 faculties.

To get the latest news, read the November edition of our e-newsletter, Technion LIVE.

To read previous issues of Technion LIVE, click here. To subscribe, click here.

Researchers in the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at the Technion developed a technology that inhibits development of melanoma using one-millionth of the active ingredient. The study, published in Advanced Functional Materials, was led by Prof. Marcelle Machluf, Dean of the Faculty, and PhD student Lior Levy.

Immunotherapy in action. This development is a significant breakthrough in the field of immunotherapy – an innovative medical approach that has become one of the most promising trends in cancer treatment. The approach is based on the ability of the body’s own immune system to destroy cancer cells. This system can do that more accurately and specifically than synthetic anti-cancer drugs. However, since the malignant tumor is heterogeneous and evasive, it can sometimes fool the immune system, and this is where science enters the picture, with new tools that help the immune system deal with this challenge.

TRAIL protein. At the core of this new development is a protein called TRAIL, which exists in the body’s immune system and knows how to induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) of cancer cells. In other words, it is a Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF). Another advantage: it is selective, meaning it only affects cancer cells, a highly desirable feature in anti-cancer treatment. The application of TRAIL in immunotherapy has so far encountered various technical challenges, including the absorption of the protein in the body, its distribution (pharmacokinetics), and the fact that it does not survive for very long. This study offers a solution to these problems.

Nano-Ghosts technology. The development presented in the Technion researchers’ article is based on original technology developed by Prof. Machluf in her years at the Technion: Nano-Ghosts. The platform is produced by emptying specific biological cells (mesenchymal stem cells) in a way that leaves only the cell membrane and reducing their size to a nanometer scale. Any drug can be inserted into the membrane and injected directly into the bloodstream. Because the body’s immune system treats nano-ghosts as natural cells, it delivers them to the affected site. They do not release the drug on the way, and therefore do not harm healthy tissue. They target the malignant tissue, where they deliver the drug into the tumor cells.

Integration. The study integrates the three aforementioned factors: the immunotherapy concept, the TRAIL protein, and the Nano-Ghost technology developed by Prof. Machluf. The result: a drug delivery system with the active protein on its outer layer, which allows reduction of the drug dosage by a factor of a million while maintaining the same treatment effect.
According to Prof. Machluf, “this integration turns the Nano-Ghost platform from a “taxi” that delivers the drug to the target into a “tank” that participates in the war. The integrated platform delivers the drug to the tumor and enables a significant reduction in drug dosage yet still does the job. We also showed that our method does not harm healthy cells.”

The technology was demonstrated on cells in the lab and on human cancer cells in mice. The researchers estimate that this new strategy, which was demonstrated in their study on a melanoma model, will also be effective on other types of cancer.

To read the full academic article, click here. 

Thanks to the support of the Adelis Foundation, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology will establish the André Deloro Building for Transformative Biomedical Sciences and Engineering. The new center, the only one of its kind in Israel, will be devoted to interdisciplinary medical, scientific, and engineering research. Its mission will be to advance research in human health by facilitating collaboration among researchers from different faculties and disciplines.

The Deloro Building will provide a meeting place for top Technion researchers. It will form a bridge between fields studied separately up until now, to foster discoveries and to stimulate creative, innovative applied research that will revolutionize medical treatments and devices. It will encourage collaboration between the worlds of medicine, science, and engineering.

“Human health is one of the main challenges facing humanity in the 21^st century,” said Technion President Professor Uri Sivan. “Like other huge challenges, a significant revolution in human health requires multidisciplinary efforts. To take full advantage of the Technion’s capabilities, this initiative will encompass a full spectrum of science and technology. It will support human health research and the conversion of research discoveries into applications and products that will serve the medical system and medical teams on the front lines. The idea is to build a bridge between medicine and life sciences, exact sciences, engineering, data science, and design.”

“With the unprecedented progress of new technologies, we are entering a new phase in the development of applied and creative research in the field of human health”, said Mrs. Rebecca Boukhris, ADELIS Foundation Trustee. “In the next few years, we will see the emergence of the “multidisciplinary researcher” notion thanks to the growing influx of new data that will allow the researcher to further develop his research work. This requires large research institutions, such as the Technion, to provide their best researchers with new structures, but also with new solutions designed to promote collaboration between researchers of different specialties in common research projects. Indeed, the Adelis  Foundation is convinced that by bringing together talented researchers from different specialties, in laboratories equipped with the latest state-of-the-art equipment, they will be able to come up with new innovative ideas that will lead to important discoveries in the field of human health.

This is why the Adelis Foundation has decided to participate in setting off this transformation by funding the creation of the André Deloro Institute for Transformative Biomedical Sciences and Engineering, which it considers “a catalyst.”

Fifty years ago, Technion management made a groundbreaking decision: establishing a medical school in a scientific – technological university. They did so because they understood that combining medicine with engineering will accelerate research and development, and lead to medical innovations, including drugs, medical devices, diagnostics, and imaging technologies.

Indeed, inspired by the Technion’s entrepreneurial environment, many researchers on campus are focusing on developing medical applications, using the extensive knowledge amassed at the Technion in exact sciences, engineering, data science, and life science. Moreover, researchers from all faculties collaborate to translate this knowledge into innovative technologies. The Technion’s close connections with high-tech industries in general and the bio-medical engineering sector, in particular, enable researchers to translate these technologies to products and treatments that contribute to human health in Israel and around the world.

Researchers from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon Center in Germany have developed a new concept for fabricating membranes for on-demand nanoparticle separation with high selectivity. These membranes are relevant for diverse applications that include pharmaceutical processing, materials separation, water purification, and wastewater treatment.

Published in Advanced Materials, the research study was led by Assistant Professor Tamar Segal-Peretz and Ph.D. student Assaf Simon of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Technion, together with Dr. Zhenzhen Zhang and Professor Volker Abetz of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon Research Center.

High-selectivity molecular separation is a common process in nature that occurs, for example, in cell membrane channels. Membrane channels separate the interior of the cell from its outside environment and regulate which materials can pass into and out of the cell. Inspired by nature, numerous research groups have attempted to develop similar membrane channels that enable precise filtration of various materials for diverse industrial applications. But synthetic fabrication of such membranes, with high levels of well-ordered pores, and high uniformity and selectivity, poses a complex engineering challenge, made even more complex when the membranes are intended for extremely small nanoparticle separation.

The Technion and Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon researchers succeeded in fabricating such membranes using block copolymers – spontaneously self-assembled polymer molecules, in combination with metal oxide growth on and within the block copolymer pores. The process developed by the researchers provides an excellent method for precisely tuning the pore size as well as other properties of the membrane. In addition, the metal oxide is an ideal base for incorporating functional groups on the membrane surface, granting it unique properties, such as electric charge and hydrophobicity (water repellency). These membranes exhibited superior performance in the separation of nanoparticles based on size, charge, and/or hydrophobicity.

Prof. Segal-Peretz estimates the breakthrough will provide various industries with a new, versatile, and accurate tool for the filtration of molecules, pollutants, and other particles.

Click here for the paper in Advanced Materials.

Recruitment of new faculty, specialization in entrepreneurship, face-to-face studies on campus, preparatory course in mathematics and a variety of new tracks: The Technion prepares for the 2021/22 academic year.

The 2021/22 academic year opened at the Technion on Sunday, October 24. This year, 2,000 new students joined the Technion campus, bringing the student population to about 15,000 students in 17 faculties. 11,595 will study towards a bachelor’s degree, while the rest will be studying toward graduate degrees. 218 of the master’s students are studying at the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York.

“It is wonderful to open the year and see the campus fill up again,” Technion President Professor Uri Sivan said in a greeting to the students. “In recent months, we have begun to prepare for the centennial celebrations of the Technion. The beginning in 1924 was modest – 16 young men and one young woman – in a single building in the Hadar neighborhood, and today, we have a large and developed campus, a bustling intellectual center.”

“We meet today after three difficult semesters, in which social distancing was imposed on all of us due to the coronavirus pandemic,” Senior Vice-President of the Technion, Professor Oded Rabinovitch said to the students at the opening ceremony. “We view social and interpersonal aspects as important, and they’re based upon meeting you on campus. We recognize the importance of human interaction in education, exchange of views, creativity, imagination, intellectual independence, attention to details, and more. Aim high, try to find the directions in which you will excel. Good luck, everyone.”

The share of women among undergraduate students now stands at 42% (among first-year students, the percentage of women is 44%), thanks to the strategy led by the Technion to increase the percentage of women in higher education. Over the past decade, this strategy has led to a significant increase in the number of female students choosing academic studies in the fields of science and engineering at the Technion.

This year, the most sought-after faculties among new students were the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, and the Faculty of Medicine.

Also noteworthy: the Technion now offers new students a three-week preparation course leading up to the opening of the academic year, free of charge, focusing on mathematics and other skills; an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree program; entrepreneurship studies; and, for the first time this year, a unique track toward a combined degree in physics and aerospace engineering.

What do ultrasound imaging of a fetus, cellular mobile communication, micro motors, and low-energy-consumption computer memories have in common? All of these technologies are based on ferroelectric materials, which are characterized by a strong correlation between their atomic structure and the electrical and mechanical properties.

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology researchers have succeeded in changing the properties of ferroelectric materials by vacating a single oxygen atom from the original structure. The breakthrough could pave the way for the development of new technologies. The research was headed by Assistant Professor Yachin Ivry of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, accompanied by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Hemaprabha Elangovan and Ph.D. student Maya Barzilay, and was published in ACS Nano. It is noted that engineering an individual oxygen vacancy poses a considerable challenge due to the light weight of oxygen atoms.

In ferroelectric materials, a slight shift of the atoms causes significant changes in the electric field and in the contraction or expansion of the material. This effect is the result of the fact that the basic repeating unit in the material contains atoms that are organized in an asymmetric structure.

In order to explain this further, the researchers use the seminal ferroelectric material, barium titanate, the atoms of which form a cubic-like lattice structure. In these materials, a unique phenomenon occurs: the titanium atom draws away from the oxygen atoms. Since titanium is positively charged and oxygen is negatively charged, this separation creates polarization, or in other words, an electric dipole moment.

A cubic lattice has six faces, so the charged atoms move into one of six possibilities. In different parts of the material, a large number of neighboring atoms shift in the same direction, and polarization in each such area, which is known as a ferroelectric domain, is uniform.

Traditional technologies are based on the electric field created in those domains. However, in recent years, a great deal of effort has been directed at minimizing the device size and using the borders, or walls, between the domains rather than the domains themselves, and thus converting the devices from three-dimensional structures to two-dimensional structures.

The research community has remained divided in opinion as to what happens in the two-dimensional world of the domain walls: How is the border between two domains with different electric polarization stabilized? Is the polarization in domain walls different to the polarization in the domains themselves? Can the properties of the domain wall be controlled in a localized manner? The great interest in addressing these questions stems from the fact that a ferroelectric material in its natural form is an excellent electric insulator. However, the domain walls may be conducting electrically, thus forming a two-dimensional object that are controllable by will. This phenomenon encompasses the potential to reduce significantly the energy consumption of data storage and data processing devices.

In this project, the researchers succeeded in deciphering the atomic structure and electric field deployment in domain walls at the atomic scale. In their recent article, they corroborate the assumption that domain walls allow for the existence of a two-dimensional border between domains as a result of partial oxygen vacancy in areas that are common to two domains, thus enabling greater flexibility in the deployment of the local electric field. They succeeded in engineeringly inducing an individual oxygen atom vacancy and demonstrated that this action creates opposing dipoles and greater electric symmetry – a unique topological structure called a quadrupole.

With the aid of computer simulations by Shi Liu of Westlake University in China, the researchers demonstrated that engineering the oxygen atom vacancy has a great impact on the electrical properties of the material not only at the atomic scale, but also at the scale that is relevant to electronic devices – for example, in terms of electrical conductivity. The significance is that the present scientific achievement is likely to be of help in miniaturizing devices of this kind as well as reducing their energy consumption.

In collaboration with researchers from the Negev Nuclear Research Center, the Technion research group also demonstrated that oxygen vacancies can be engineered by exposing the material to electronic radiation. Consequently, in addition to the technological potential of the discovery in electronics, it may also be possible to utilize the effect for radiation detectors, allowing for the early detection – and prevention – of nuclear accidents, such as the one that happened in 2011 in Fukushima, Japan.

The research, which was carried out at the Electron Microscopy Center in the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering, was funded by the Israel Science Foundation and the Pazy Foundation. The Nano and Quantum Functional Structures Laboratory, headed by Asst. Prof. Ivry, is supported by the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program.

For the article in ACS Nano click here

Researchers at the Technion – Israel institute of Technology, in collaboration with researchers from CNRS, recently published findings about the development of an artificial molecule that may inhibit the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The molecule breaks down the toxic chemical complex Cu–Aβ, thus inhibiting the cell death that is thought to be related to Alzheimer’s. The study was led by Professor Galia Maayan and doctoral student Anastasia Behar from the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, in collaboration with Prof. Christelle Hureau from the Laboratoire de Chimie de Coordination du CNRS, Toulouse, France.

Copper ions are a key component of the structure and function of various cells in the body. But their accumulation can lead to cell toxicity, causing dangerous conditions such as oxidative stress, cardiovascular disorders, and degenerative diseases of the brain, including Alzheimer’s.

One of the mechanisms involved in the development of Alzheimer’s is the formation of free radicals that damage the brain cells. These are oxidizing agents formed, among other things, by Cu–Aβ, a complex of copper and amyloid beta.

It is already known that the breakdown of this complex, and the removal of copper from the amyloid, prevents cell death, followed by the inhibition of the disease. The extraction of the copper is done by chelation – using molecules that bind the copper ions and extract them from the amyloid.

However, this is not a simple challenge, because the chelators must meet several critical chemical and kinetic conditions, including stability and resistance to oxidation-reduction reactions. It is also important that the chelator does not bind zinc ions during the copper extraction process, as they are also essential for neuron function (but do not cause toxicity when they are bound to the amyloid); if the chelator does not bind the zinc, it can continue to bind the copper ions, but if it binds zinc, copper binding will be inhibited.

The Technion and CNRS researchers report in the Angewandte Chemie on the successful development of a new artificial chelator that meets all these requirements. The chelator, called P3, is a peptide-like water-soluble synthetic molecule that performs its task selectively; it strongly binds copper and forms the complex CuP3, extracting the copper from the amyloid. By doing so, it inhibits and even suppresses the formation of harmful oxidizing agents, without creating new oxidation processes. Although it binds zinc ions and even extracts them from the amyloid faster than it extracts the copper ions, the binding to zinc is weaker, making the zinc-amyloid complex unstable, so in practice P3 mostly binds copper ions.

Click here for the paper in Angewandte Chemie

Doctors at Maccabi Healthcare Services have recently begun to work with an AI-based predictive algorithm developed by the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology together with KSM (Kahn-Sagol-Maccabi), the Maccabi Research and Innovation Center. The new algorithm advises doctors in the process of deciding on personalized antibiotic treatment for patients.

The first diagnosis on which Maccabi chose to focus is urinary tract infection (UTI) – the most common bacterial infection among women. Around 30% of the females suffer from the infection at least once during their lifetime, and up to 10% experience recurrent infections. Until now, in most cases general treatment has been administered based on clinical guidelines and medical judgment. Sometimes, the bacteria prove to be antibiotic resistant, resulting in the need to change the treatment plan.

Since the new algorithm was introduced, Maccabi doctors have treated tens of thousands of cases, and there has been a drop of around 35% in the need to switch antibiotics following the development of bacterial resistance to the drug prescribed. This is significant because accuracy in the choice of antibiotic is far greater thanks to the new technology. In light of the success of this new development in the treatment of UTI, Maccabi has begun working on the development of additional detection systems that will help to contend with other infectious diseases that require personalized treatment with antibiotics.

 

How does it work?

The automated system recommends the most suitable antibiotic treatment for the patient to the doctor, based on clinical guidelines and other criteria such as age, gender, pregnancy status, residence in an assisted living facility, and personal history of UTI and antibiotics administered.

The unique algorithm was developed by Professor Roy Kishony and Dr. Idan Yelin of the Technion Faculty of Biology, in cooperation with KSM, Maccabi’s Research and Innovation Center, headed by Dr. Tal Patalon, and was introduced and implemented among Maccabi’s doctors by the HMO’s Medical Informatics team and Chief Physician’s Department. According to Prof. Kishony, “The algorithm we developed together with Maccabi’s experts is a major milestone in personalized medicine on the way to AI-based antibiotic treatments, which are personally tailored to the patient according to the prediction of treatment response and mitigate the development of resistant bacteria.”

 

Dr. Shira Greenfield, Director of Medical Informatics at Maccabi Healthcare Services, said, “The significance of administering personalized antibiotic treatment is that it lowers the risk of antibiotic resistance developing – a global problem which all healthcare entities are working to solve.”

Your phone pings. It’s a notification from your friend, who you just went out for a drink with last night. According to her text, she has just tested positive for COVID-19. You start feeling your throat, you sneak a short cough, and start to feel your body temperature rising. But then you calm down (after receiving your negative COVID results, of course) and realize these feelings were all in your head. But what if this is exactly it – what if there were indeed neurons in the brain that could induce a sensation of illness, or even an actual disease?

Psychosomatic disorders are described as diseases emerging with no apparent biological cause, and often include a strong emotional component as a trigger. In a study recently published in Cell, Technion scientists explore the brain’s potential to cause diseases on its own. Specifically, they induced inflammation in mice, and then triggered the neurons in the brain that were active during the initial inflammation.

The study was conducted by the research group of Associate Professor Asya Rolls from the Technion Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, led by Tamar Koren, an M.D./Ph.D. student in the lab. They showed that during colon inflammation, several brain regions exert enhanced neuronal activity, one of which was the insular cortex (insula). The insula is an area in the brain responsible for interoception, that is the sense of the body’s physiological state. This includes hunger, thirst, pain, and heart rate.

The researchers postulated that if report of inflammation in some area of the body is stored somewhere in the brain, this area responsible for interoception would be involved. Armed with this hypothesis, they induced in mice an inflammation in the colon and using genetic manipulation techniques, “captured” groups of neurons in the insular cortex that showed increased activity during the inflammation. Once the mice were healthy, the researchers triggered these “captured” neurons artificially. Without any outside stimulus other than this triggering of cells in the brain, inflammation re-emerged, in the exact same area where it was before. “Remembering” the inflammation was enough to reactivate it.

If the brain can generate disease, is it possible that it can also turn it off?

In a similar manner, Tamar also demonstrated the opposite effect: in mice with active inflammation, suppressing the neurons that remembered it produced immediate reduction in the inflammation. Although this was a basic study in mice, and there are multiple challenges in translating the concept to humans, these discoveries open a new therapeutic avenue for treating chronic inflammatory conditions such as Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, and other autoimmune conditions, by attenuating their memory trace in the brain.

“There are evolutionary advantages to such a connection,” said Prof. Rolls in explaining the strange phenomenon whereby the immune system should be activated by memory alone, without an outside trigger. “The body needs to respond to infection as quickly as possible before the attacking bacteria or viruses can multiply. If certain activity, for example consuming particular foods, has exposed the body to infection and inflammation once, there is an advantage to gearing up for battle when one is about to engage in the same activity again. A shorter response time would allow the body to defeat the infection faster and with less effort. The problem of course is when such an effective mechanism goes out of control and can on its own generate the disease.”

The group’s findings have broad implications for understanding the way the human mind and body affect each other, but also more immediate implications for understanding and treating illness with a psychosomatic element, like irritable bowel syndrome, and even autoimmune diseases and allergies.

The study was done in collaboration with Dr. Kobi Rosenblum, of the University of Haifa and Dr. Fahed Hakim, of EMMS Hospital, Nazareth. This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, the Allen and Jewel Prince Center for Neurodegenerative Disorders of the Brain, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the Wellcome trust.

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-t9n3FNrg4&t=1s&ab_channel=Technion” width=”700″ height=”200″]

For the full article in Cell click here.

An international research team headed by Technion scientists has found an alternative manner for eliminating damaged proteins when the cells are impaired by “oxygen radicals,” as can happen in failing human hearts where there is poor cell respiration and cells become oxygen depleted, or suffer “hypoxia,” because of poor oxygen uptake.

Significantly, the researchers discovered that there can be a shift from the tightly controlled process of eliminating proteins in the cells to a less strict mechanism when cells enter an “emergency protocol.” This shift can “clear up” the toxic proteins before their toxicity levels get too high.

Their study was published on 26 October 2021 in Nature Communication. To carry out their study, the researchers investigated several “proteasomes,” protein complexes that work by a chemical reaction to degrade unneeded or damaged cell proteins. The researchers found that elevated levels of one type of proteasome, 20S, appears to contribute to cell survival, even for those cells under stress from damaged proteins.

Human cells – both functional and damaged – are constantly recycled by chemically “tagging” and targeting for removal when they are under stress by the ubiquitin system (2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry). At the same time, a few proteins that are intact and functional can also be dragged into the 20S proteasome “molecular disposal unit” along with the toxic proteins that have be targeted for destruction. Nevertheless, rather than harm cells, this mode of action by 20S proteasome may aid cells in rapidly remove toxic proteins. In their conclusion, the authors raised the interesting speculation that this emergency pathway can help even damaged cells to withstand bouts of stress and allow them to “age gracefully”.

To carry out the study, Technion researchers Dr. Indrajit Sahu, Prof. Michael Glickman, Prof. Ashraf Brik, and Prof. Oded Kleifeld worked with Prof. Sharlene Day from the University of Pennsylvania and the research team of Prof. Yao Cong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China.

Click here for the paper in Nature Communications