Israel Active

Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute reported the results of their Personalized Nutrition Project . They discovered that bacteria in the stomach of different people reacts differently to the same food. Some even lost weight from ice cream and buttered bread.

Israel’s Redhill Biopharma announced positive top-line results from its Phase III study with RHB-105 for treating Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infections. RHB-105 achieved 89.4% efficacy in eradicating H. pylori with no serious adverse events or unexpected safety issues.

Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are developing a tiny antenna that can be inserted into the stomach via an endoscopic tube to detect and treat early-stage cancers too small to be treated by current methods. At present, doctors have to wait until the tumor is large enough to treat.

Israel’s Chiasma has developed the oral treatment Octreotide, for acromegaly - abnormal growth due to a tumor of the pituitary gland that causes severe life-threatening health problems. Chiasma is also planning an IPO on NASDAQ.

Israeli medical experts From Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center are involved in about a dozen sessions of the 2015 World Congress of the International Society for Posture and Gait Research. The Israeli company Meditouch is also exhibiting.   

Israel’s Doctome digital doctor platform is part of IBM’s startup incubator. It links to IBM’s Watson supercomputer and to WhatsApp and is the basis of a fully-functioning telemedicine service.

Israeli researchers at the Judea Research and Development Center have discovered that the Israeli shrub Chiliadenus iphionoides increases sugar absorption and reduces blood sugar levels. They are now trying to isolate the active ingredient in order to make an accessible diabetes treatment.

Professor Ofer Mandelboim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has won the 2015 Kaye Innovation for discovering that blocking the NKp46 receptor on Natural Killer cells delays or prevents the onset of Type 1 (Juvenile) Diabetes. Israel’s BioLineRX developed BL-9020 to target NKp46.

The 2nd Joint Symposium took place last week between Dublin’s Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute and Israel’s Weizmann and Technion Institutes. See the pdf report on last year’s event and joint Israeli-Irish research into cancer and inflammatory diseases.

Here’s another chance to take the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s free nine-week introductory course by Professor Idan Segev on neuroscience. Over 60,000 took the original “Synapses, Neurons and Brains” course, including many from Arab countries.