Israel Active

UK medical journal The Lancet reported the first implants of the interatrial shunts from Israel’s V-Wave .  In less than 1 hour, each of 10 Canadian patients suffering poor left ventricular function received new implants and were discharged home next morning.

Doctors at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem removed a tumor from the spine of a 3-year-old Palestinian Arab boy from Gaza to prevent him from becoming paralyzed.  The unique six-hour surgery involved stretching the boy’s spine and removing a vertebra. =

The US FDA has approved the DermaCompare melanoma (skin cancer) diagnosis system developed by Israel’s Emerald Medical (formally DermaCare).  The smartphone app enables tele-dermatology to detect possible melanomas and save lives.

Israel’s Professor Anat Lowenstein was selected in the top 100 most influential people in the world of ophthalmology by Ophthalmologist Magazine. It noted that “her contribution to, and influence in the field of medical and surgical retina cannot be underestimated.”

Israel’s Magdent has developed an electromagnetic-based technology that could speed up the process and improve bone quality in patients who are having trouble getting their implants in place.  After animal trials, a human study is now necessary.

A huge 25-year study of almost 100,000 women by researchers at Ben Gurion University and Soroka University Medical Center has concluded that fertility treatment has no cardiovascular risk to mothers.  4,153 women receiving fertility therapies were compared to 95,138 who conceived naturally.

Israel’s Sweetch has developed a clinical-outcome prediction platform, a behavioral analytics engine and risk meter, to stop diabetes before it starts.  Sweetch’s proprietary machine-learning algorithms detect pre-diabetes seven times more accurately than existing clinical evaluation.

The U.S. FDA has approved Cinqair - the asthma treatment from Israel’s Teva - for adults who have a history of severe attacks despite taking medication.  More than 22 million Americans had asthma as of 2013, and there are more than 400,000 asthma-related hospitalizations each year.

Israel’s BioSight is pleased with its Phase I/IIa study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of its Astarabine treatment for Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and relapsed/refractory Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL).  Full results later this year. 

In Israel’s Negev desert it sometimes takes ambulance services half an hour to reach remote communities. So United Hatzalah is running a training course to increase the numbers of its EMS volunteers from 150 to 250. Its goal is at least one volunteer in every village and kibbutz and to cut the overall response time for EMS personnel throughout the region.