Month: November 2022

We are thrilled to announce that Andrea and Lawrence Wolfe have received the Albert Einstein Award, the highest recognition given by the American Technion Society (ATS). Expressing his gratitude for all of their support, Technion President Uri Sivan shared: “Your contributions represent the essence of what the Technion was built on: applying the knowledge provided by science for the benefit of humanity and producing the next generation of the brightest minds in science and engineering.”

Andi and Larry Wolfe are involved in supporting the Michigan-Israel Partnership for Research and Education, in which the Technion plays a central role. Over the last decade, the D. Dan and Betty Kahn Foundation (named for Andi’s parents and of which Larry is the President) has supported many vital initiatives at Rambam and the Technion, including the D. Dan and Betty Kahn Foundation Pediatric Pulmonary Institute, the D. Dan and Betty Kahn Foundation Center for Interventional Cardiology, the D. Dan and Betty Kahn Mechanical Engineering Building and most recently, and the Wolfe Center for Translational Medicine and Engineering.

Larry Wolfe has been a member of the American Friends of Rambam Board of Directors for many years. Andi is a member of the Technion Board of Governors and on the National Board of Directors of the American Technion Society (ATS). Both Andi and Larry have also been involved in many other projects in Israel and in the State of Michigan. Among their generous contributions, Andrea and Lawrence Wolfe have supported Professor Marcelle Machluf and her technology for drug delivery and cancer therapy, which helped her launch the biotech company NanoGhost. Over the years, their contributions have enabled Technion researchers to widen and further their impact in a variety of important fields.

 

On behalf of the Technion community, we sincerely thank you for your support!

Researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed a revolutionary invisible facemask to protect wearers against the transmission of COVID, MERS, influenza, and other respiratory viruses.

Although conventional facemasks help protect against disease transmission, recent scientific literature shows that they also present adverse psychological and physiological effects. They reduce facial identification and emotion recognition, adversely affect oral communication, and can cause headaches and skin problems. Wearing masks throughout the workday also results in a lack of focus, as well as reduced attention and patience in a wide range of professions. As a result of these difficulties, many people wear masks incorrectly – on or below their mouths – which greatly reduces protection. Even in Japan, where facemasks are common, a large study found that just 20% of people wear masks correctly.

Conventional facemasks have also led to a dramatic rise in plastic waste, exacerbated by governmental mask-wearing mandates, producing millions of tons annually.

Now, a Technion team led by Professors Moshe Shoham and David Greenblatt has come up with a radically new solution to the conventional mask dilemma by creating an invisible “air-screen” in front of the wearer’s face. The air-screen originates from within a lightweight filter-covered unit mounted on the visor of a cap. Several major advantages became clear: the air-screen protects the eyes, nose, and mouth without negative effects on facial identity, emotion recognition, or oral communication. The air screen is also reusable, so it does not pollute the environment.

Recently published research, based on experiments conducted in Prof. Greenblatt’s laboratory, demonstrated the air-screen’s efficacy by effectively blocking aerosols produced during oral communication, as well as large droplets produced by coughing and sneezing. It also removes quiescent aerosol-laden air from in front of the face by a process known as “entrainment.” This joint effect of blocking and entrainment can be seen in the video, where laser illumination is used to render the airflow visible. David Keisar and Anan Garzozi, students in the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program, were instrumental in conducting and analyzing the experimental data, and in developing a theoretical physics-based mathematical model of the air-screen.

Several one-on-one interviews and pilot studies with more than 50 subjects from various sectors (e.g., older adults and their caretakers in nursing homes, university professors and their students, close-proximity workers including tutors, physiotherapists and psychologists, retail workers in stores and offices, and high-tech management teams and board members who participate in long meetings indoors), clearly showed the advantage of the invisible air screen over the commonly used face masks.  These groups represent potential early adopters, who will benefit most from this new technology in Israel and globally.

The Technion recently licensed the technology to Wisdome Wearables Ltd. This new startup is currently in the process of commercializing the product, and seeking partners to realize this disruptive technology for the benefit of those at high-risk of suffering from respiratory viruses.

For the full article, click here

One in nine women in the developed world will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in her life. The prevalence of breast cancer is increasing, an effect caused in part by the modern lifestyle and increased lifespans. Thankfully, treatments are becoming more efficient and more personalized. However, what isn’t increasing – and is in fact decreasing –  is the number of pathologists, or the doctors whose specialization is examining body tissues to provide the specific diagnosis necessary for personalized medicine. A team of researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have therefore made it their quest to turn computers into effective pathologists’ assistants, simplifying and improving the human doctor’s work. Their new study was recently published in Nature Communications.

The specific task that Dr. Gil Shamai and Amir Livne from the lab of Professor Ron Kimmel from the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion set out to achieve lies within the realm of immunotherapy. Immunotherapy has been gaining prominence in recent years as an effective, sometimes even game-changing, treatment for several types of cancer. The basis of this form of therapy is encouraging the body’s own immune system to attack the tumor. However, such therapy needs to be personalized as the correct medication must be administered to the patients who stand to benefit from it based on the specific characteristics of the tumor.

Multiple natural mechanisms prevent our immune systems from attacking our own bodies. These mechanisms are often exploited by cancer tumors to evade the immune system. One such mechanism is related to the PD-L1 protein – some tumors display it, and it acts as a sort of password by erroneously convincing the immune system that the cancer should not be attacked. Specific immunotherapy for PD-L1 can persuade the immune system to ignore this particular password, but of course would only be effective when the tumor expresses the PD-L1.

It is a pathologist’s task to determine whether a patient’s tumor expresses PD-L1. Expensive chemical markers are used to stain a biopsy taken from the tumor in order to obtain the answer. The process is non-trivial, time-consuming, and at times inconsistent. Dr. Shamai and his team took a different approach. In recent years, it has become an FDA-approved practice for biopsies to be scanned so they can be used for digital pathological analysis. Amir Livne, Dr. Shamai and Prof. Kimmel decided to see if a neural network could use these scans to make the diagnosis without requiring additional processes. “They told us it couldn’t be done,” the team said, “so of course, we had to prove them wrong.”

Neural networks are trained in a manner similar to how children learn: they are presented with multiple tagged examples. A child is shown many dogs and many “not-dogs”, and from these examples forms an idea of what “dog” is. The neural network Prof. Kimmel’s team developed was presented with digital biopsy images from 3,376 patients that were tagged as either expressing or not expressing PD-L1. After preliminary validation, it was asked to determine whether additional clinical trial biopsy images from 275 patients were positive or negative for PD-L1. It performed better than expected: for 70% of the patients, it was able to confidently and correctly determine the answer. For the remaining 30% of the patients, the program could not find the visual patterns that would enable it to decide one way or the other. Interestingly, in the cases where the artificial intelligence (AI) disagreed with the human pathologist’s determination, a second test proved the AI to be right.

“This is a momentous achievement,” Prof. Kimmel explained. “The variations that the computer found – they are not distinguishable to the human eye. Cells arrange themselves differently if they present PD-L1 or not, but the differences are so small that even a trained pathologist can’t confidently identify them. Now our neural network can.”

This achievement is the work of a team comprised of Dr. Gil Shamai and graduate student Amir Livne, who developed the technology and designed the experiments, Dr. António Polónia from the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology of the University of Porto, Portugal, Professor Edmond Sabo and Dr. Alexandra Cretu from Carmel Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, who are expert pathologists that conducted the research, and with the support of Professor Gil Bar-Sela, head of oncology and hematology division at Haemek Medical Center in Afula, Israel.

“It’s an amazing opportunity to bring together artificial intelligence and medicine,” Dr. Shamai said. “I love mathematics, I love developing algorithms. Being able to use my skills to help people, to advance medicine – it’s more than I expected when I started out as a computer science student.” He is now leading a team of 15 researchers, who are taking this project to the next level.

“We expect AI to become a powerful tool in doctors’ hands,” shared Prof. Kimmel. “AI can assist in making or verifying a diagnosis, it can help match the treatment to the individual patient, it can offer a prognosis. I do not think it can, or should, replace the human doctor. But it can make some elements of doctors’ work simpler, faster, and more precise.”

For the article in Nature Communications click here

 

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded four early-career Technion scientists with Starting Grants, recognizing the great promise in their research fields. These scientists are: Assistant Professor Inbal Talgam-Cohen from the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science; Assistant Professor Ofra Amir from the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management; Assistant Professor Noga Ron-Harel from the Faculty of Biology; and Assistant Professor Naama Geva-Zatorsky from the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine.

ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research and is part of the Horizon Europe program. The ERC Starting Grant is aiming to assist excellent early-career scientists, who are starting their career as heads of their own lab, in forming their teams and pursuing their most promising ideas.

 

Prof. Ofra Amir’s main research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. People often find it hard to trust computer systems, because they don’t understand their behavior. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a great potential to benefit society in areas such as transportation, healthcare and education. But to fulfill this potential and collaborate effectively with AI, we need to be able to know when we can trust its decisions. For example, a driver of an autonomous vehicle will need to anticipate situations in which the car fails and hands over control, while a clinician will need to understand the treatment regime recommended by an AI to determine whether it aligns with the patient’s preferences. The objective of Prof. Amir’s study is to develop adaptive and interactive methods for conveying the behavior of AI-based systems to users, develop algorithms that determine what information about AIs’ behavior to share with users and, design interfaces that allow users to proactively explore AIs’ capabilities in order to understand them better.

 

Prof. Naama Geva-Zatorsky studies the interactions of the gut microbiota with our immune system and their potential effects on our health. In particular, she seeks to understand better their functionality and spatial organization – where exactly in the intestine the microbes thrive, how they adapt to their environment, and how they affect us – their mammalian host. These questions have a particular importance for colitis and Crohn’s Disease, types of inflammatory bowel diseases. Specifically, Crohn’s patients’ intestines display patches of gut inflammation surrounded by uninflamed regions, with a clear demarcation but unknown cause. Prof. Geva-Zatorsky seeks to find out why some areas of patients’ guts become inflamed while others do not, understand how the microbes and the patients’ immune system interact, and hopefully obtain knowledge that could lead to new and better diagnostics and treatments.

 

Aging of the immune system is the focus of Prof. Noga Ron-Harel’s study. Specifically, her work focuses on T lymphocytes. These cells are central players in our defence against pathogens, and mediate response to vaccination and immunological memory to past events. T lymphocytes are among immune cell populations that are most detrimentally affected by aging. Strikingly, old and dysfunctional T cells promote organ ageing and age-related morbidities. Prof. Ron-Harel aims to delve into the pathways by which T cells interact with their aging microenvironment and vice versa, understand the cause-and-effect relations between organs’ ageing and T cells’ ageing, and perhaps find new ways to rejuvenate both.

 

Prof. Inbal Talgam-Cohen works in the field of Algorithmic Game Theory, her particular interest being algorithms with economic and societal applications. Such algorithms can’t be designed in a void; they constantly interact with humans, who have their own interests. Prof. Talgam-Cohen proposes to apply the algorithmic lens to a field in economics called ‘contract design’, recognized by the 2016 Nobel Prize. That is, contracts could be designed by means of algorithms, in ways that would incentivize all parties involved to invest effort towards a fruitful cooperation. Applications of this approach range from traditional contracts moving to online platforms, like freelancing, to novel data-driven incentive schemes for domains like digital healthcare.

 

Prof. Jacob (Koby) Rubinstein, the Technion Executive Vice President for Research, said “the achievements of the four faculty members place us at the forefront of the most outstanding universities in Europe. No less important, there’s noteworthy gender representation here – something to be proud of for us, and of course for the four women themselves.”

Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said: “We are proud that we are empowering younger researchers to follow their curiosity. These new ERC laureates bring a remarkable wealth of scientific ideas, they will certainly further our knowledge and some already have practical applications in sight. I wish them all the best of luck with their explorations.”

President of the European Research Council Prof. Maria Leptin said: “It is a pleasure to see this new group of bright minds at the start of their careers, set to take their research to new heights. I cannot emphasize enough that Europe as a whole – both at national and at EU level – has to continue to back and empower its promising talent. We must encourage young researchers who are led by sheer curiosity to go after their most ambitious scientific ideas. Investing in them and their frontier research is investing in our future. It is a pleasure to see this new group of bright minds at the start of their careers, set to take their research to new heights. I cannot emphasize enough that Europe as a whole – both at national and at EU level – has to continue to back and empower its promising talent. We must encourage young researchers who are led by sheer curiosity to go after their most ambitious scientific ideas. Investing in them and their frontier research is investing in our future.”

Students at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management have developed computational tools for predicting the success of harvests. These tools will help the volunteer Israeli organization Leket Israel gather unused food and distribute it to those in need, reducing food waste in the process.

A recent event was conducted between Leket Israel and the Technion in the format of a Datathon using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud environment that provides tools for storing information, computing, and handling big data.

The participants were all undergraduate students in the faculty, studying data science and engineering or information systems engineering. They were required to develop computational methods to predict the amount and type of produce that would be made available to Leket Israel at any given time in any region of the country. These predictions would improve Leket’s ability to plan the harvesting of the produce efficiently, further reducing food waste and increasing the donations of food to the various organizations throughout the country.

The event was opened by data science Professor Avigdor Gal, one of the initiators of the Technion’s Data Science and Engineering program in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management – one of the first such educational curriculums around the world. He explained that “the event is part of the faculty’s annual extracurricular activities designed to generate social and ethical awareness among students, with the understanding that their professional occupation in the future will require access to data that impacts society, for example social media content, health data, and the like.”

According to Professor Liat Levontin, who is also a member of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, “the Datathon was designed to improve the food supply chain of Leket Israel while analyzing its collection and distribution data. Data science students from the faculty proposed technological solutions expected to reduce food waste and improve the recipients’ trust in the supply chain. As part of a large study by EIT FOOD, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, we found that consumer trust in the food supply chain has significant implications, for example, on healthy eating habits, and we believe that the Datathon will advance consumer’s trust.”

According to Dr. Gila Molcho, director of academic projects and coordinator of the faculty excellence programs, “beyond the fun of participating in the competitive side of a datathon, the students gained experience in understanding data and extracting insights within a given time frame. Furthermore, they experienced a sense of personal empowerment and satisfaction from being part of the Data for Good experience. Our collaboration with Leket Israel will not end with the Datathon. Our information systems engineering students will continue developing a management tool for Leket Israel as part of their annual capstone project.”

The Datathon was organized by the Technion’s Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Data for Good Israel, Leket Israel, the Technion’s Social Incubator and EIT FOOD – Consumer Trust Grand Challenge with the support of Tech.AI, the Technion’s Center for Artificial Intelligence.

     

On October 9, the most energetic gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever measured was observed. The burst, which occurred 2.4 billion light-years from Earth, was documented as GRB 221009A.

In an amazing coincidence, an article predicting the maximum energy of GRBs written by researchers at the Faculty of Physics at the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology was accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, which many say is the most important journal in astrophysics. Entitled “The Maximum Isotropic Equivalent Energy Of Gamma Ray Bursts,” the article predicted not only the strength of the eruption but also its other characteristics. It was written by Professors Arnon Dar and Shlomo Dado. The professors recently uploaded their findings to “Internet Archive,” a repository whose stated mission is universal access to all knowledge.

A gamma ray burst is a cosmic event during which a huge amount of gamma rays and X-rays is emitted within seconds in a single pulse or in several adjacent pulses. Some 25 years ago, Dar and his colleagues, Professor Ari Laor and Nir Shaviv published an article suggesting the possibility that gamma-ray bursts may be responsible for some of the past major extinctions of life on Earth.

Gamma bursts were first discovered in 1967, when the USA sent satellites to detect possible Soviet nuclear tests in space. Such tests were prohibited by an international agreement, but the Americans suspected that the USSR was conducting them in space on the assumption that it would be impossible to detect them from Earth due to the atmospheric absorption of x and gamma rays. Six years later, in 1973, only after it became clear that they were not caused by humans, their existence was published.

In the first two decades after the discoveries of gamma-ray bursts, most of the scientific community believed these events were taking place in the Milky Way, which is “our” galaxy. Only in 1991 did the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) obtain observational evidence that these events occur mainly in other, very-distant galaxies.

In 1994, Prof. Dar, together with Prof. Nir Shaviv (his doctoral student at the time), published a new model explaining the phenomenon – a narrow jet of balls of matter emitted at the birth of neutron stars or black holes. These balls move at a speed – close to that of the speed of light. This model became the basis of the “cannonball model” that was later developed by Profs. Dar and Dado with their colleague Prof. Alvaro De Rujula from the CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. According to this model, the balls of matter scatter the light and matter in their path, thus creating a narrow beam of high-energy photons, electrons and atomic nuclei. When the photons in the beam reach Earth, they are observed by ground and space telescopes.

In their current article, Profs. Dar and Dado link the phenomenon of gamma-ray bursts to cosmic rays, which were discovered at the beginning of the last century and remain a mystery that has not been solved to this day. This should not be confused with the cosmic background radiation that originated in the Big Bang. The researchers explain that the magnetic fields in space scatter the electrons and atomic nuclei in the beam without them losing their energy. These particles become part of the so called cosmic rays which fill space.

Profs. Dado and Dar show that these two phenomena – cosmic rays and gamma-ray bursts – are probably born together in the birth of a neutron star or a black hole. Under this assumption, they estimated the maximum energy of GRBs, only slightly more than that of GRB 221009A.

On average, gamma-ray bursts are observed once a day, but bursts of the magnitude of GRB 221009A are estimated to reach Earth only once every 500 years. The burst observed on October 9 this year was measured by NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope and by an array of gamma-ray detectors that were installed in space. Its location was determined the next day using the giant VLT telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

To read Profs. Dar & Dado’s article, click here

The eruption report on the NASA website: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-swift-fermi-missions-detect-exceptional-cosmic-blast

Researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed an innovative technology for growing tissue for transplantation by printing it into a microgel bath as support material. The research, published in Advanced Science, was led by Professor Shulamit Levenberg and her doctoral student Majd Machour from the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering along with Professor Havazelet Bianco-Peled and doctoral student Noy Hen from the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering and The Norman Seiden Multidisciplinary Graduate program in Nanoscience & Nanotechnology.

Tissue printing is an innovative approach for creating tissue for transplantation. In this technique, also called bio-printing, living cells are embedded in biological ink and printed layer upon layer. The printed tissue then undergoes growth for days or weeks until it is ready for printing.

According to Prof. Levenberg, “many research groups around the world are working on improving tissue printing, but most of them are focusing on the printing phase and the initial product – the printed tissue. However, the growth phase of the tissue – that is, the period between the printing and the transplantation in the target organ – is no less important. This is a complex period in which the printed cells divide, migrate, and secrete their extracellular matrix and attach to each other to create the tissue. One of the problems is that in this complex process, the tissues tend to distort and shrink in an uncontrolled manner.”

The Technion researchers thus focused on preventing the uneven shrinkage of the printed tissue in the weeks after printing. The solution was found through changing the medium in which the tissue is printed and grown. The new concept, print-and-grow, is based on an original medium developed by the researchers – an innovative microgel used as a support material in the process, CarGrow, which is a substance mainly composed of carrageenan (Carrageenan-K) and is produced from red algae. In fact, the new support bath preserves the size of the tissue after printing and prevents it from shrinking and losing its shape. This process allows reliable and controlled production of functional tissue in the desired size and shape. Since this material is transparent, it makes it possible for the scientists to monitor the development of the tissue through imaging.

The Technion researchers hope the new method will lead to the development of new technologies for bio-printing. The research was supported by an ERC (European Research Council) grant from the European Union.

About a year ago, Prof. Levenberg published another breakthrough in the field of bio-printing in Advanced Materials. In that study, she was able to create a printed tissue flap based on collagen and living cells containing major blood vessels and small blood vessels that feed the tissue and make possible a connection to the artery after the transplant. This allowed immediate blood flow into the engineered tissue right after the transplant, which accelerates and improves the integration of the tissue in the body. You can read more about that study here.

For the article in Advanced Science click here

Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions – “biocomputers” of sorts. Graduate students and researchers from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel’s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology & Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create genetic “devices” designed to perform computations like artificial neural circuits. Their results were recently published in Nature Communications.

The genetic material was inserted into the bacterial cell in the form of a plasmid: a relatively short DNA molecule that remains separate from the bacteria’s “natural” genome. Plasmids also exist in nature, and serve various functions. The research group designed the plasmid’s genetic sequence to function as a simple computer, or more specifically, a simple artificial neural network. This was done by means of several genes on the plasmid regulating each other’s activation and deactivation according to outside stimuli.

What does it mean that a cell is a circuit? How can a computer be biological?

At its most basic level, a computer consists of 0s and 1s, of switches. Operations are performed on these switches: summing them, picking the maximal or minimal value between them, etc. More advanced operations rely on the basic ones, allowing a computer to play chess or fly a rocket to the moon.

In the electronic computers we know, the 0/1 switches take the form of transistors. But our cells are also computers, of a different sort. There, the presence or absence of a molecule can act as a switch. Genes activate, trigger or suppress other genes, forming, modifying, or removing molecules. Synthetic biology aims (among other goals) to harness these processes, to synthesize the switches and program the genes that would make a bacterial cell perform complex tasks. Cells are naturally equipped to sense chemicals and to produce organic molecules. Being able to “computerize” these processes within the cell could have major implications for biomanufacturing and have multiple medical applications.

The Ph.D students (now doctors) Luna Rizik and Loai Danial, together with Dr. Mouna Habib, under the guidance of Prof. Ramez Daniel from the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion, and in collaboration with Prof. Ron Weiss from the Synthetic Biology Center, MIT,  were inspired by how artificial neural networks function. They created synthetic computation circuits by combining existing genetic “parts,” or engineered genes, in novel ways, and implemented concepts from neuromorphic electronics into bacterial cells. The result was the creation of bacterial cells that can be trained using artificial intelligence algorithms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The group were able to create flexible bacterial cells that can be dynamically reprogrammed to switch between reporting whether at least one of a test chemicals, or two, are present (that is, the cells were able to switch between performing the OR and the AND functions). Cells that can change their programming dynamically are capable of performing different operations under different conditions. (Indeed, our cells do this naturally.) Being able to create and control this process paves the way for more complex programming, making the engineered cells suitable for more advanced tasks. Artificial Intelligence algorithms allowed the scientists to produce the required genetic modifications to the bacterial cells at a significantly reduced time and cost.

Going further, the group made use of another natural property of living cells: they are capable of responding to gradients. Using artificial intelligence algorithms, the group succeeded in harnessing this natural ability to make an analog-to-digital converter – a cell capable of reporting whether the concentration of a particular molecule is “low”, “medium”, or “high.” Such a sensor could be used to deliver the correct dosage of medicaments, including cancer immunotherapy and diabetes drugs.

Of the researchers working on this study, Dr. Luna Rizik and Dr. Mouna Habib hail from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, while Dr. Loai Danial is from the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering. It is bringing the two fields together that allowed the group to make the progress they did in the field of synthetic biology.

This work was partially funded by the Neubauer Family Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, the Technion’s Lorry I. Lokey interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

For the article in Nature Communications click here

Researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed a technique to measure the long-term effects of antibiotic combinations, or cocktails. These combinations are of serious interest to the scientific and medical communities because the use of single antibiotics often leads to the rapid development of bacterial resistance to these drugs.

The research published in Nature was led by Technion researchers Professor Roy Kishony from the Faculty of Biology and Dr. Viktória Lázár, a postdoctoral student in his lab who is now working at the Synthetic and Systems Biology Unit of the Biological Research Centre in Szeged, Hungary.

The researchers discovered that in many cases, a combination of several antibiotics may actually reduce the treatment’s effectiveness in the long term – meaning that the combination of drugs could prove to be inferior to the success of each individual drug. However, they point to specific combinations that do manage to prevent the development of resistance and thus protect the patient for a long period from the aggressive bacteria.

The bacterium tested in the study is Staphylococcus aureus, a particularly violent bacterium that has developed resistance to many types of antibiotics. This bacterium is responsible for a significant part of nosocomial (in-hospital or in-clinic) infections. The study was conducted both in cultures of this bacterium in the lab and in an animal model – larvae of the Galleria mellonella moth.

Antibiotics are a family of drugs that play a central role in modern medicine and save lives on a daily basis. The natural antibiotic substances that developed during evolution in fungi and yeast were discovered about a century ago in the research of Londoner Sir Alexander Fleming, Australia-born Howard Walter Florey, and immigrant to England from Berlin who was of Russian-German-Jewish descent Ernst Boris Chain. The three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1945. In the past century, antibiotic treatment has saved hundreds of millions of people.

However, the success of antibiotic therapy has turned into a double-edged sword because the widespread use of these anti-bacterial drugs leads to the evolutionary development of bacteria that develop resistance. This trend raises a justified fear of a post-antibiotic era, or a period when bacteria will no longer respond to antibiotic drugs and people will die, as in the past, from infections that are now considered mild and not dangerous.

The laboratory of Prof. Kishony, one of the leading experts in the field of antibiotic resistance, develops methods that make it possible to estimate in advance the resistance of a given bacterium to a given antibiotic in the present and even to predict the resistance level it is expected to develop in the future. In the current study, a combination of different antibiotic drugs that prevent the formation of resistance was examined.

The researchers noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the use of antibiotics, even though SARS-CoV-2 is not affected by antibiotics on account of it being a virus and not a bacterium. However, giving antibiotics helps COVID-19 patients to avoid secondary bacterial infections. With the growth of antibiotic use, the evolution of resistant Staphylococcus aureus strains accelerates.

To summarize, the Technion researchers discovered that combinations of antibiotics may harm the effectiveness of the treatment and point to specific combinations that speed up or inhibit the development of resistant bacteria. In doing so, they help pave the way for more effective treatments and the curbing of the “resistance epidemic” that threatens humanity.

Click here for the paper in the Nature

A new paper published in Nature Communications presents a study on unique peptides with anti-cancer potential. The study was led by Professor Ashraf Brik and post-doctoral fellows Dr. Ganga B. Vamisetti and Dr. Abbishek Saha from the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, along with Professor Nabieh Ayoub from the Technion’s Faculty of Biology and Professor Hiroaki Suga from the University of Tokyo.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids linked by peptide bonds, the name given to chemical bonds formed between two molecules when the carboxyl group of one molecule reacts with the amino group of the other molecule. Unlike proteins that usually contain hundreds of amino acids, peptides contain – at most – dozens of such acids. The cyclic peptides the researchers discovered bind specifically to chains of ubiquitin proteins – proteins that are usually used as a “death tag” for damaged proteins. The labeling of the damaged proteins leads to their being broken down in the proteasome, or the cell’s “garbage can.”

The discovery of the ubiquitin system led to the awarding of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three researchers, including Distinguished Professors Aharon Ciechanover and Avraham Hershko of the Technion’s Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine.

Over the years, it became clear that the activity of the ubiquitin system depends in part on the point where the ubiquitin molecules are linked to each other in the chain. For example, linking the ubiquitin in the chain at position 48 (K48) leads to the removal of proteins to the proteasome, while linking the ubiquitin at position 63 (K63) leads to the repair of damaged DNA.

In recent years, Technion researchers have developed a new approach to influencing the ubiquitin mechanisms. Instead of interfering with the activity of enzymes that affect these mechanisms, they decided to try to directly intervene in the ubiquitin chain itself.

Based on this approach, the researchers in a previous work developed cyclic peptides that bind the K48-linked ubiquitin chains, preventing it from leading to the breakdown of the damaged proteins. This disruption gradually leads to programmed cell death. In the same study, the researchers hypothesized and then proved that when such an event formed in a malignant tumor, it killed the cancer cells, potentially protecting the patient. This discovery, published in 2019 in the journal Nature Chemistry, has led to the establishment of a new startup that is advancing the discovery towards clinical use.

In the current study, cyclic peptides that bind the chains linked to position 63 in ubiquitin and that are involved in repairing damaged DNA were discovered. The researchers found that when attached to these ubiquitin chains, such peptides disrupt the aforementioned repair mechanism. This leads to the accumulation of damaged DNA, and to cell death. Here too, when this binding occurs in cancer cells, it destroys these cells. The researchers believe this therapeutic strategy could be more effective than existing anti-cancer drugs, against which patients gradually develop a resistance.

Prof. Brik is the head of the Jordan and Irene Tark Chair in the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry. He has won many excellence awards, including the Outstanding Researcher Award from the Israel Chemical Society and the prestigious ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant.

For the full article in Nature Communications click here.

A new academic year brings new discoveries & achievements: a rising star, a new center of excellence, a student win, a Healthy Aging Center and more. All this in the October 2022 newsletter. Click here to read.

To a large extent, renewable energy sources depend on environmental conditions that are, over time, changing and uneven. These variables make it impossible to integrate them directly into the electricity grid, and necessitate an energy-storage system that mediates between them and the electricity grid. This presents one of the most significant challenges of our time: the development of energy-storage systems on a significant scale.

Today, flow batteries are considered to be one of the leading solutions for large-scale energy storage. In flow batteries, similar to lithium-ion batteries, an electric current is created as the result of an interaction between two materials, but the essential difference between them is that in flow batteries the materials are not solid and instead are constantly flowing.

A flow battery is a type of electrochemical cell in which chemical energy is provided by two chemical components dissolved in liquids that are then pumped through the system on separate sides of a membrane. Ion exchange accompanied by flow of electric current occurs through the membrane while both liquids circulate in their respective spaces. The most prominent advantages of flow batteries are a long life, safety, and the use of materials that do not pollute the environment. The problem is that the rate of energy release in these batteries is lower than the alternatives.

Now, a breakthrough from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology could help address that problem. The study published in Flow: Applications of Fluid Mechanics was led by doctoral student Sofia Kuperman and Dr. Rona Ronen in the laboratories of Prof. Amir Gat and Prof. Matthew Suss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Normal flow batteries have a primary flow channel. In the current study, the researchers added a secondary flow channel to the battery that is separated from the main channel by a perforated electrode. The secondary channel causes a flow to form from the main channel towards the electrode, and thus increases the number of interactions (the rate of battery discharge).

The main result of the study is that the innovative design of the flow battery makes possible a 350% faster energy discharge rate compared to the classic design of the flow batteries. The improvement suggested in the article is of great importance in speeding up the application process of flow batteries together with renewable energy sources and in reducing the carbon footprint resulting from emissions from burning fuels for the production of energy.

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