Israel Active

Israel’s Dr Doron Garfinkel is a pioneer of intervention to prevent elderly patients taking many treatments. The complex interactions due to “polypharmacy” can lead to alzheimer’s-like symptoms. Dr Garfinkel visits patients to review and agree which medicines are essential and which can be stopped.

(Thanks to NoCamels) 7-8 million people a year suffer blood leakage from their heart’s mitral valve. Now Israel’s MitrAssist is developing a valve implant that will to work in unison with the body’s own valve to prevent leakage and restore normal blood flow.

Founder of several biotech companies, Dr Ido Bachelet is also assistant professor in the faculty of Life Sciences and the Nano-Center at Bar Ilan University. He explains what computers the size of molecules can do inside the body. These tiny computers exist in Israel today.

Israel’s Re-Step has developed a “magic” shoe called “step of mind” that allows people with brain damage to re-learn how to walk. The first treatment cycle using the computerized shoe at Israel’s Reuth Medical Rehabilitation Center has improved the walking competence of 10 people with brain damage.

Tel Aviv University researchers have invented a method for repairing damaged peripheral nerves. A biodegradable implant and a new Guiding Regeneration Gel (GRG) to increase nerve growth and healing can repair a torn or damaged nerve, relieving pain and restoring mobility.

It sounds like science fiction, but the European Commission has granted 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) to Weizmann Institute graduate and ex-faculty member Henry Markram to simulate the entire human brain on a supercomputer. 6,000 researchers are expected to work on the project.

(Thanks to NoCamels.com) Ben-Gurion University researchers have shown that chronic stress increases the susceptibility to an autoimmune disease similar to multiple sclerosis, which is characterized by damage to the nervous system in the brain.

Another terrific video from Israel’s InSightec, which is using non-invasive ultrasound surgery to cure Parkinson’s and essential tremors, to destroy tumors and fibroids and perform hysterectomies. InSightec’s founder Dr Kobi Vortman learnt many of his skills at Israel’s Technion.

Delegates at the Israeli Advanced Technology Industries’ June 2013 Biomedical Conference chose the topics in advance. Participants of the Israeli Life Science industry’s premier event sent in their suggestions, voted, and the top 250 subjects formed the program.

In the 1980s, Zelig Eshhar, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, conceived a cure for cancer: combine monoclonal antibodies with T cells in the immune system. Today, the treatment has cured 20 cancer patients in Pennsylvania and at other US centers.