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Unprecedented achievements for the Technion – Israel Institite of Technology synthetic biology team at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, held in Paris from October 26 to 28. The students won a gold medal, were ranked first in the Bio-manufacturing and Measurement categories, and ended in the Top 10 overall. The group are engineering special bacteria to produce an industrial substance that deters hair loss, and which can be added to regular shampoos and other haircare products.

This year, the iGEM team from the Technion includes 12 students from across the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, and the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. The team recently received a special Impact grant given to only a small number of the teams participating in the global competition, based on their projected benefits to humanity.

iGEM Technion 2022 team. Standing from right to left: Iser Snoyman, Amit Nelkin, Nova Noiman, Baraah Rashed, Matan Hoory, Ran Benayoun and Yasmin Habib; Sitting: Irina Shkalikov, team head Maya Lerman, Mazal Faraj, Reut Laufer and Yana Shklovski.

Every year, the team chooses an innovative project in the field of synthetic biology, and this year, it involves substances that inhibit hair loss caused by chemotherapy. One of the most common cancer treatments, chemotherapy causes damage to healthy living tissues and oftentimes hair loss, among other severe side effects.

The Technion team set to compete in iGEM is working on proving the feasibility of lab production of Decursin, a hair loss deterrent, and its possible incorporation into preparations including shampoo, cream, and more. Decursin is a major component of Angelica gigas Nakai (AGN) root extract. It has many beneficial properties including the abilities to suppress inflammation, repress cancer, and prevent apoptosis – or programmed cell death, including in hair follicles.

Today, the molecule is produced from a rare seasonal flower grown in Korea, by means of an expensive and inefficient process. The student team is engineering bacteria that will produce Decursin industrially.

The prestigious iGEM competition was founded in 2004 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to give students, mainly undergraduates, a chance to experience scientific and applied research in the world of synthetic biology. Since its inception, the competition has been held in Boston. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was held online for the past two years. Now, it will be held for the first time in Europe at the conference center Paris Expo-Porte de Versailles.

This year, more than 300 teams from around the world will participate in the competition, including three Israeli teams – one from the Technion, one from Tel Aviv University, and one from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The first Israeli iGEM team was established at the Technion in 2012 under the guidance of Professor Roee Amit, a faculty member in the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering. He guides the Technion team to this day.

Over the years, teams from the Technion have won multiple gold medals in the competition. But according to Prof. Amit, “beyond participation and winning, it is important to understand that some of the developments by the Technion teams have already been turned into applied and commercial tracks and have a real impact on the world. One of the most prominent examples is Koracell, which was founded on the basis of the technology developed by our students in preparation for a competition iGEM in 2019. The group developed an innovative technology for the production of honey without bees using a genetically engineered bacterium. This technology allows the honey’s texture and taste to be precisely designed, and it is also a platform for simulating other natural metabolic processes.”

The Koracell team recently launched a crowdfunding campaign that offers unique designed products related to synthetic biology, as well as workshops and lectures by group members in synthetic biology, private lessons for high school pupils, and more.

For the campaign page, click here.

Lorry I. Lokey

The Technion mourns the loss of our good friend and most generous supporter – Lorry Lokey of Atherton, California, USA.

Lorry was a visionary philanthropist who insisted his donations become game changers. In the Technion, he supported, single handedly, the establishment of the Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering, strongly believing that only the merging of basic scientific discoveries with the ability to apply them technologically – will benefit human kind. The Center, which was launched in 2006 under the directorship of Aaron Ciechanover, the 2004 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, transformed profoundly biomedical research in the Technion and served as an example for other universities in Israel.

Lorry was committed to the State of Israel, and wanted to see her flourishing as a center of knowledge in this area of the world. He strongly believed that the road to achieve this goal traverses the combination of high education and interdisciplinary research. For his generous donation, he became a life member of the Board of Governors of the Technion and the university bestowed upon him an Honorary Doctorate. The entire Technion family extends its heartful condolences to Mr. Lokey’s daughters – Basya Lokey, Miriam Khaka, and Ann Lokey – and to the entire family.

L-R: Prof. Yitzhak Apeloig, then President of the Technion; Lorry Lokey; Prof. Aaron Ciechanover

One of the first discoveries of quantum physics is that light is made up of particles called photons. Most of the light beams in everyday life contain a large number of photons, but there are interesting applications based on weak light beams. Quantum communication is based on the transfer of data using single photons, when the information is encoded using a certain property of light (e.g., a photon’s color or spatial shape).

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects cannot be described as independent states of each of the objects, but only in relation to each other. As soon as a measurement is made on one of the intertwined objects, it is immediately reflected in the other. The upside is huge, as quantum communication can guarantee total immunity to eavesdropping.

Prof. Alex Bronstein

Prof. Ady Arie

One of the common techniques in producing entangled photon pairs is a process called spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), a technique based on sending a laser light beam through a non-linear optical crystal. The laser beam has a myriad of photons and occasionally one of the photons will spontaneously decay inside the nonlinear crystal and produce a highly correlated photon pair. To harness the SPDC process for quantum communication applications, one must create conditions that will lead to the formation of those unique photon pairs.

In a paper published recently in Optica, the flagship magazine of the Optical Society, a collaborative team of researchers from the Technion -Israel Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University present a method that suggest a new way to create entangled photons, based on computational learning tools (https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.451115). Partners include Eyal Rozenberg, a doctoral student in Professor Alex Bronstein’s research group from the Technion, and members of Professor Ady Arie’s group from Tel Aviv University, Aviv Karnieli, Ofir Yesharim, Joshua Foley-Comer, and Dr. Sivan Trajtenberg-Mills, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project team was joined by an external expert from Google, Dr. Daniel Freedman.

Eyal Rozenberg

Aviv Karnieli

Ofir Yesharim

Dr. Sivan Trajtenberg

Dr. Daniel Freedman

Joshua Foley-Comer

As their first step, the researchers developed a numerical model that makes it possible to accurately predict the statistical index that evaluates the correlations between the two photons created in the SPDC process for a given optical system. In the second step, both the crystal’s structure and the laser’s structure were used as parameters on which learning can be performed and a cost function was defined – a function that represents the distance between the result obtained by running the numerical model and the result the system-designer wants to reach. When the learning process was activated, it produced the properties of the nonlinear crystal and the laser beam that would produce a result as close as possible to the desired quantum state.

“Our work, together with its complementary code (https://github.com/EyalRozenberg1/SPDCinv), can contribute to additional exciting advances and discoveries in other quantum and classical systems. We decided to publish the whole algorithm as an open-source code to make it possible for additional research groups around the world to use the tools we have developed,” concluded Rozenberg.

A scientific diagram: The journal Optica presents a new way to design an optical system to obtain the desired photonic entanglement – a collaboration between researchers from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University

Researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed an automatic system for the design and preparation of stabilizing materials to produce a “nanometric package” – a platform for delivering drugs to cancer tumors in the body. In an article published in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers report that by using the innovative system, they developed the necessary materials to create the platform and even demonstrated, in preclinical experiments, its effectiveness in solid malignant tumors.

The research was conducted in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering under the leadership of doctoral student Yuval Harris and lab director Dr. Hagit Sason-Bauer working with Yosi Shamay, assistant professor of biomedical engineering for anticancer nanomedicine and nanoinformatics.

L-R: Dana Niezni, Yuval Harris, Dr. Hagit Sason-Bauer and Prof. Yosi Shamay

Anti-cancer drugs such as chemotherapy and kinase inhibitors are designed to destroy cancer cells, but one of their main problems is that only a small fraction of the medicinal substance reaches its destination – the cancer cells themselves. The rest of the drugs are dispersed in the body, damaging healthy tissues. This results in the well-known side effects of nausea (as a result of damage to the intestinal tissue), hair loss, and more serious repercussions.

The damage to healthy tissues caused by anti-cancer drugs is the background for the development of dedicated “packaging” – nanometric capsules that carry the drug to the target and release it there while preventing its leakage into healthy tissues. About 40 nanomedicine products, including the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19, have already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but the development of such transport capsules is a complicated technological challenge. As such, many research groups are working to improve them.

L-R: Yuval Harris, Dr. Hagit Sason-Bauer and Prof. Yosi Shamay

In their Biomaterials article, the Technion researchers present a breakthrough in this topic – an automated process for developing optimal materials for the preparation of these capsules. The process is used both as a robot-chemist that synthesizes new materials and as a robot-pharmacist that formulates them into nanocapsules containing the anti-cancer drug.

“The technology we developed,” explained Asst. Prof. Shamay, “is based on an interesting phenomenon called aggregation-induced emission (AIE) – light emission based on the aggregation state of the drug. This effect means that in its solid or aggregated form, it emits a lot of light energy, but when it is soluble or stable in a capsule, it emits almost no light. Out of about 40 drugs we tested, we found 10 new drugs in which this effect occurs. They can be used as selection criteria in the automated process.”

Prof. Yosi Shamay

The automatic system developed at the Technion makes it possible to know, according to the light energy emitted from the drug, which substance makes the best nanoparticles for that drug. This technique led to the discovery of a new stabilizing material whose properties give it many advantages over the existing materials used to create nanometric capsules for drug delivery.

The researchers discovered that the new material is superior in various aspects to the existing materials including efficiency, safety, the uniformity of the particles that make it up, stability over time, and the number of drugs that can be “wrapped” and stabilized with it. All of these traits make it a super stabilizer suitable for the ever expanding field of treatment using nanoscale capsules.

PhD student Yuval Harris

The new material, named R595, was created in a “green” chemical reaction, meaning a reaction that does not require the use of polluting and toxic organic solvents. It demonstrates a very high efficiency of drug loading (90%), which makes it possible to predict the treatment’s effectiveness. In preclinical trials, the effectiveness of the capsule was demonstrated in the treatment of solid tumors resulting from a mutation common in lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and intestinal cancer.

Laboratory director Dr. Hagit Sason-Bauer

The research was supported by Israel’s National Science Foundation and the Health Ministry. The researchers thank Victoria Zlobin from the Preclinical Research Authority at the Technion.

For the article in Biomaterials click here

Professor Alain Aspect and Professor Anton Zeilinger, two of the three laureates for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, received honorary doctorates from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in recent years. Together with Professor John Clauser, Profs. Aspect and Zeilinger were awarded the Nobel Prize for their breakthroughs in quantum mechanics.

Prof. Anton Zeilinger receiving the honorary doctorate from President of the Technion Prof. Uri Sivan and Executive Vice President for Research Prof. Koby Rubinstein

Prof. Anton Zeilinger received his honorary degree from the Technion last summer during its Board of Governors meeting. Born in Austria in 1945, he is a professor and head of the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Vienna, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and senior scientist at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

He received his honorary doctorate from the Technion in recognition of his seminal contributions to quantum science and technology; in appreciation of his dedication to attracting young people to the field; in tribute to his efforts in envisioning science as a platform to enrich the human spirit; and for uniting the Israeli and European academic communities on the path to scientific achievement.

Prof. Alain Aspect receiving the honorary doctorate in 2011 from then-Technion Vice President Prof. Paul Feigin

Born in 1947 in France, Prof. Alain Aspect is a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau (which has since become part of the University of Paris-Saclay). The winner of many awards, he was accepted in 2015 as a foreign member of the Royal Society of Sciences of Great Britain.

Prof. Aspect received his honorary doctorate from the Technion at the Board of Governors meeting in 2011 in tribute to his fundamental contribution and outstanding scientific achievements in the fields of quantum mechanics and optics; in gratitude for his education of generations of students who continue making significant contribution to world changing technologies; in recognition of his outstanding leadership in the scientific community; and in gratitude for his friendship and support for the Technion and the State of Israel.

Profs. Aspect, Clauser,and Zeilinger presented experimental evidence for the existence of the quantum-entanglement phenomenon. Entanglement is a special relationship between particles. When two or more particles are intertwined, manipulation of one particle will simultaneously affect another particle that is at a great distance from it without physical interaction and without the transfer of information. Albert Einstein once claimed the phenomenon is a “spooky action at a distance.”

It was Prof. Aspect who showed the interweaving is an existing phenomenon. Prof. Zeilinger added to this the unique phenomenon of quantum teleportation – the transfer of a quantum state from a given particle to another particle. Here, too, there are important connections to the Technion. The entanglement phenomenon was first presented by Einstein, Russian-American physics Professor Boris Podolsky, and American-Israeli physics Professor Nathan Rosen, who was one of the founders of the Technion Physics Department. The idea of teleportation was proposed by six scientists, including the late Professor Asher Peres, another one of the founding fathers of the Technion Physics Department.

Prof. Zeilinger’s honorary doctorate video:

Prof. Aspect’s honorary doctorate conferment:

Israeli researchers have developed a new technique for controlling the magnetic properties of materials. The method draws inspiration from mineral growth processes by organisms in nature. The research was led and initiated by Prof. Boaz Pokroy and doctoral student Arad Lang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Dr. El’ad Caspi and his team of researchers from the Nuclear Research Institute in the Negev, and Dr. Giorgia Confalonieri and Dr. Catherine Dejoie from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France.

Prof. Boaz Pokroy

Biominerals are structures created in nature by almost all animals for a wide variety of purposes, such as building the bones that support the body or the mollusk shell that protects the mollusk inside. These structures are characterized mostly by excellent mechanical properties, meaning they are relatively hard to break. One of the reasons for this is the fact that within the inorganic structure of the mineral, organic molecules (proteins) are integrated and serve as a sort of “glue” that prevents cracks from propagating within the mineral.

Graduate student Arad Lang

Inspired by this phenomenon, researchers in Prof. Pokroy’s lab grew crystals of the mineral manganese carbonate (MnCO₃) in the presence of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins. It turns out that in this synthetic process, the organic molecules, that is the amino acids, also succeed in incorporating themselves into the crystal structure of the mineral. These molecules push the manganese and carbonate ions away from each other and create distortions in the structure of the host crystal.

Scanning electron microscope images of manganese carbonate crystals, without (a) amino acids and with (b) amino acids incorporated in the crystal. Scale bar: 200 nanometers.

The researchers then measured the magnetic properties of the crystals that were created. In the measurement, which was conducted at a very low temperature (2 K, about -270 degrees Celsius), it became clear that the new material – manganese carbonate that contains the amino acids – is characterized by a higher magnetic susceptibility than the original material, making it very easily affected by the activation of an external magnetic field. In addition, as the amount of amino acid in the material increases, the reaction of the material to the field becomes even stronger. It also became clear that the threshold temperature, that is the maximum temperature at which the material behaves magnetically, (also called the “Neel temperature”) dropped as a result of the introduction of the amino acids.

The reason for these changes is the distancing of the atoms from each other inside the crystal. This process causes the weakening of the magnetic interactions within it, so there is a stronger effect of the external field.

Illustration of the changes in the magnetic properties of manganese carbonate as a result of the incorporation of amino acids.

For the first time, this article presents the possibility of controlling the magnetic properties of materials by incorporating organic molecules that are not magnetic themselves. This study paves the way for using small, non-toxic molecules to change the magnetic properties of a wide variety of materials used in many fields, including medicine and microelectronics.

For the article in Advanced Materials click here

Leading the center are Dr. Gal Oren and Prof. Hagit Attiya from the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Prof. Danny Hendler from the Computer Science Department of Ben-Gurion University.

Using Intel’s oneAPI developer cloud, the center will offer a comprehensive course covering the fundamental and advanced possibilities of using oneAPI and OpenMP* for shared-memory parallelism, especially with accelerators. The center will lead in training the next generation of developers by promoting projects that will identify key open source HPC/AI applications and port them via oneAPI with OpenMP/SYCL. The center will open source the curriculum, offer train-the-trainer activities, localize efforts with other Israeli universities (such as Ben-Gurion university), and provide an online presence.

“We are excited to establish the new oneAPI Center of Excellence with Intel,” says Dr. Oren, who leads the venture. “As heterogeneous supercomputers worldwide are on the rise, and diverse high-performance computing is practically ubiquitous, there is a need to raise a new generation of developers who can push legacy and new-generation applications performance to the limit. With oneAPI, we can close the gap between software and hardware and exploit the full potential of both. The future, in this regard, is here, and we are planning to seize the moment.”

“Technion’s oneAPI Center of Excellence, the first in Israel, is an exciting step forward preparing students for a multi-architecture computing world by teaching them SYCL and oneAPI”, says Scott Apeland, senior director of Intel Developer Ecosystem Programs. “This oneAPI Center brings open, standards-based programming skills to students to innovate, drive research, and advance science and industry.”

As we celebrate the upcoming new year, we rejoice in the Technion’s accomplishments: The Technion was recently ranked 83^rd by the prestigious Shanghai Ranking of the world’s best universities – 11 places higher than last year. The Technion was also ranked first in Europe on the list of Worldwide Universities Granted U.S. Utility Patents in 2021, and first in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe.

To learn more, check out our festive September edition of “Technion LIVE.”

Shana Tova!

Dear Technion Family,

Rosh Hashanah always heralds the beginning of the new academic year, and we’re delighted to welcome new and continuing students to campus this fall. We were also pleased to host the Technion Board of Governors recently, after not having convened in person for three long years.

Universities around the globe are challenged by the ongoing revolution in the way knowledge is accumulated and distributed. Digital technologies replace traditional teaching methodologies, calling for rethinking the role of the physical campus and face-to-face meetings in the learning process.

The Technion is preoccupied with these questions. We have invested considerable resources in the Center for Promotion of Learning and Teaching and will continue to expand it in the coming years. In addition to developing new methodologies, its professional team proactively trains lecturers and develops new, cutting-edge curricula.

The newly inaugurated Mehoudar Center for Inventors is a good example of how we are changing the way we teach: the Center encourages inventors from all over Israel to gain experience in creative engineering design by building and testing prototypes. The Center provides resources, tools and a skilled technical team, and nurtures cross-faculty and multidisciplinary collaborations.

Recently, the Technion and Rambam Health Care Campus established the Wolfe Center for Translational Medicine and Engineering, which will serve as a platform for extensive clinical applied research by interdisciplinary teams of physicians, scientists, and engineers, and will promote new technologies that will benefit human health. The new May-Blum-Dahl MRI Research Center at the Technion will further enable researchers and students to use advanced imaging techniques to conduct multidisciplinary research in fields related to human health.

Another field with existential implications for the world is sustainability. The Technion is committed to being a leader in this area and we have launched a campus-wide Sustainability Committee charged with heading this important effort, across faculties.

As the Technion works to further bolster its role as Israel’s leading institution of science and engineering, we’ve embarked on a process of strengthening our ties with local and global industry leaders. Important collaborations are already in place with companies such as Google, PTC, Intel, IBM, and Doral Energy, and others are forming.

Furthermore, we have established a new academic position that opens the door for leading researchers from industry to spend at least one day a week at the Technion, taking part in teaching and research, as well as mentoring graduate students.

As we celebrate the upcoming new year, I rejoice in the Technion’s accomplishments and renew my commitment to continuing on this path of excellence. Just last month, the Technion was ranked 83^rd by the prestigious Shanghai Ranking of the world’s best universities – 11 places higher than last year. The Technion was also ranked first in Europe on the list of Worldwide Universities Granted U.S. Utility Patents in 2021, and first in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe. I am also proud of the growing number of successful tech transfers involving Technion researchers, totaling 57 new commercialization contracts and 15 new spinoff companies in 2021/22.

This year, we are further deepening our commitment to diversity and inclusion. In addition to promoting social values in our community, I truly believe that a diverse university is a better university. I am proud to report that we recently appointed a Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, Prof. Adi Salzberg, as well as welcomed a record number of women in senior academic positions. Over the past academic year, one-third of all new faculty members and a total of seven deans were women – a significant achievement given the relatively low representation of women in science and engineering. Equally gratifying is the fact that 42% of our undergraduate students are women.

I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to Prof. Boaz Golany, Prof. Shimon Marom, and Prof. Alon Wolf, who will complete their term on September 30^th, for their immense contribution to the Technion. On October 1^st we will welcome two new vice presidents, in addition to Prof. Salzberg: Prof. Naama Brenner, who will serve as Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Prof. Wayne Kaplan, who will serve as the new Vice President for External Relations & Resource Development.

The upcoming year will be a harbinger of the Technion’s festive centennial year in 2024, during which we will celebrate our many achievements of the past century and plan for the next century. As we keep nurturing the next generation of scientific leadership, I’d like to thank our faculty, staff, students, partners, and donors for their continued, unwavering support of science and technology for the benefit of humanity.

I wish you all a healthy and prosperous new year.

Shanah Tova and Hag Sameach,

Prof. Uri Sivan

President

Four researchers have won ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) Grants from the European Research Council (ERC). The prestigious grants, which amount to 150,000 euros per researcher, are aimed at maximizing the value of excellent research by exploring the potential of academic research for future commercialization of innovative applications. They are awarded only to past winners of ERC grants.

Associate Professor Asya Rolls will receive a grant for her study of “targeted insula stimulations as treatment for autoimmune disorders.”

Assistant Professor Shai Berlin will receive a grant for his work on “MAGNIFICO-Pre-commercialization of multifunctional targeted MRI-contrast enhancing agents for brain research” – materials that will improve the quality of brain scans.

Professor Yuval Shaked will receive a grant for his work on “the development of a predictive biomarker for immunotherapy outcome based on flow cytometry test.”

Associate Professor Yoav Shechtman will receive the grant for his work on “diffractive optical element fabrication based on 3D printing.”