Israel Active

Surgeons at Clalit-Beilinson Hospital successfully removed a cancer patient's sternum and part of her ribs before reconstructing her chest with a custom 3D-printed implant. It is the first time in Israel that an entire 3D-printed chest cage has been implanted to reconstruct the chest wall.

66-year-old Gonen Klein, of Degania Bet, had advanced metastatic prostate cancer. After treatment with Lutetium-177 PSMA at Ziv Medical Center in Tzfat, follow-up imaging and blood tests showed no detectable sign of disease. His wife Rivka said “I feel I've been blessed with my husband again."

The previous newsletter reported on the work of doctors from Israel’s Save A Child’s Heart in Rwanda. Now they have moved on to Zambia, training the country’s first pediatric heart surgeons, plus several from neighboring Tanzania. Together, they saved 10 children during the week-long mission.

Bar-Ilan University researcher Jonathan Rabinowitz has led to a new feature in the Moovit app that allows public transportation users to choose routes with more walking while reaching their destinations in the same amount of time - or even faster. The feature will encourage a more healthy population.

Israel’s Sheba Medical Center will become OpenAI’s first International fully AI-powered hospital. It will allow physicians, nurses, researchers and staff to gain secure access to an advanced AI-powered platform that supports faster, better-informed clinical decisions.

Researchers say mouse models and data from 5 million health fund members show sildenafil (the active ingredient in Viagra), in combination with statins, can improve outcomes by blocking the supply of cholesterol that cancer cells need to metastasize.

Israel’s Hemispheric.ai is developing Descartes, an AI model trained on 250,000 hours of electroencephalogram (EEG) brain data taken from 100,000 paid volunteers over seven years. Descartes decodes the language of the brain’s electrical activity to diagnose conditions such as PTSD and depression.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have proved that the medication Davunetide may significantly slow the progression of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) in women. PSP is a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disease due to abnormal accumulation of tau protein in the brain.

Tel Aviv University researchers have discovered that tumors take control of macrophages that help remove dead cells. They trigger gene activity in the macrophages to support tumor growth and suppress the immune cells. New cancer therapies can now be developed.   

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum is donating $200 million to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in what is being described as the largest philanthropic contribution in the history of Israel’s healthcare system. It is expected to triple the size of the hospital, which currently has approximately 1,000 beds.