Israel Active

OrCam Learn (see previously) is a voice-activated, interactive handheld device designed for people with learning challenges. It combines AI with a high-resolution visual sensor, and laser capture. It reads text aloud from any surface, listens to the reader and provides feedback. And much more.

Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute have developed a nano-material that can deliver different toxic cancer therapies directly to tumors, without harming healthy cells. Robot chemistry was used to test different materials. The breakthrough can vastly reduce chemo side effects.

For the first time, the World Health Organization came to Israel to hold its 72nd session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe. 53 nations attended the conference from Sep 12-14 during which Israel signed bilateral health cooperation deals with Germany, Croatia, Cyprus, and Kazakhstan.

Israel’s Matricelf (see previously) was placed third out of 17,000 contenders for the 2022 Startups World Cup in San Francisco. Matricelf developed the technology for the heart 3D-printed by Tel Aviv University scientists in 2019 (see ).

Israel’s Beyeonics Vision (see previously) now has European as well as US approval for its Beyeonics One™ ophthalmic exoscope. The augmented reality (AR) surgical headset gives eye doctors vastly enhanced abilities when performing eye surgery (e.g., cataracts).

Israel’s Kahun (see previously) has expanded from merely a Covid-19 diagnosis system to a full “digital medical advisor”. Its XAI engine bases its clinical reasoning decisions on Kahun’s proprietary map of over 30 million evidence-based medical insights.

AION Labs - the Israeli innovation lab for startups (see previously) has itself launched a startup.  OMEC.AI aims to predict if a new treatment will succeed following pre-clinical trials. Its next-generation computational platform will gauge effectiveness and expose safety issues.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) was well known during the “mad cow” epidemic. But it can also be caused by an inherited gene mutation. Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center is one of only a dozen hospitals globally to use a 92% accurate spinal fluid test for early onset CJD.

Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have discovered that most tumors have fungi growing inside them. They have also documented their types using records from 17,000 cancer patients. DNA from fungi is detectable in the blood and can be used to develop a new cancer screening method.

The death of his mother led Dean Bitan to found Israel’s Imagene (see previously). The startup has developed tech that can conduct a full molecular analysis on a digitized biopsy image in real time and give a result in minutes, instead of the current situation of a few weeks.