“Mr Zielony, your actions cannot be described simply; you are a true visionary. You have provided us with the tools for genuine development. You have given us the foundations for our community. Thank you for giving our campus a heart and our students homes close to that heart. We truly feel blessed.”

“My mission in life is to provide others with the tools to realize their dreams and goals.” Shalom (Stanley) Zielony ז”ל

A flagship example of T3 Technology Transfer: Rasagiline – a discovery by Prof. Moussa Youdim now marketed as a drug for Parkinsons disease  Azilect(TM) by Teva Pharmaceuticals, also demonstrates the powerful Technion process of technology transfer – from the lab. to the marketplace. Image: Wikicommons.

Recent global headlines have evidenced the ongoing miracle of Israel’s ability to translate new discoveries into patented innovations that become applicable on world markets. In the past two months, two flagship companies created through the dynamic activities of the T3 – the Technion office of Technology Transfer, passed the key milestone and significant hurdle in the process of effective technology transfer, with the reception of approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The company Mazor Robotics won FDA approval to apply its robotic surgical system to neurosurgery in July 2012. In the same month, the flagship company Corindus won FDA approval for its CorPath 200 System to be used in performing percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI). The technology is now approved in the United States to assist interventional cardiologists in performing PCI, a procedure to restore blood flow to blocked arteries in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD).

The mission of T3 – the technology transfer arm of the Technion, is to transform scientific discoveries and innovative technologies into real-life, applied solutions for the advancement of humanity, the State of Israel, and the Technion. By creating optimal alliances between scientists, industry and investors, T3 facilitates the smooth transfer of technologies to the commercial sector. This is accomplished through the licensing of intellectual property and the establishment of start-up companies. Occasionally, T3 also plays an active role as an entrepreneur by building teams, preparing business plans and providing the capital necessary to bring the technologies developed by Technion researchers to maturity.

The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is Israel’s first university and home to three Nobel Laureates. The Technion is credited worldwide for its ability to generate start-ups, its remarkable ability to innovate and its powerful connections to industry. Known as “Israel’s MIT,” the Technion has made a significant impact across the range of applied science and technology including electronics, information technology, water management, nanotechnology, life sciences & chemistry, clean-tech, materials engineering and aerospace engineering.

During the past years, T3 has enjoyed a robust and marked increase both in the number of patent families originating from Technion research as well as in the number of commercialization successes. With 80-100 new patent filings every year, over 400 granted patents and over 900 pending patents, Technion now has approximately 400 patent families available for commercialization.

 

Image courtesy of SGI

An SGI computer which has been nicknamed the ‘Octopus’ and which is currently the largest civil server cluster in Israel has been installed at the Technion computer labs.

The computer will mainly serve researchers at the Minerva Center for Cognitive Processes and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI) but researchers from a variety of fields that demand high performance computing will also have access.

The Technion purchased the computer with all available management tools including administrative, applicative and compilers. The SGI InfiniBand Cluster supercomputer is equipped with over 1260 cores has 96 gigabytes of memory for every node with the nodes connected through an infiniBand communication protocol developed by Israel’s Mellanox Technologies and has a storage system with a minimum of 60 terabytes.

Speaking at a ceremony to launch the ‘Octopus’ at the Technion computer labs, Technion Deputy Senior Vice President Professor Daniel Rittel said: “The Octopus places us on equal footing with the world’s leading academic institutions.” Dr. Joan Adler a researcher at the Faculty of Physics noted that researchers are already reporting that the code is running 11 times faster on the Octopus than previous systems.

Diseases and conditions where stem cell treatment is promising or emerging. Source: Wikipedia

Pancreatic Tissue for Diabetes

Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Technion, who has spent many years trying to create replacement human organs by building them up on a “scaffold,” has created tissue from the insulin-producing islets of Langerhans in the pancreas surrounded by a three-dimensional network of blood vessels.The tissue she and her team created has significant advantages over traditional transplant material that has been harvested from healthy pancreatic tissue.

“We have shown that the three-dimensional environment and the engineered blood vessels support the islets – and this support is important for the survival of the islets and for their insulin secretion activity”, says Prof. Levenberg of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

In the Bones

Stem Cell Proliferation

““These are our next generation of scientists and Nobel Laureates,” says Prof. Dror Seliktar, of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. “The future of the Technion relies on that.”

Seliktar and his research team at the Lokey Center for Biomaterials and Tissue Regeneration at Technion is working on a new material for the mass production of stem cells to make their commercial use viable on an industrial scale.

“In the biotechnology industries, there is an inherent need for expanding populations of stem cells for therapeutic purposes,” says Seliktar, who has published over 50 papers in the field, won over 14 awards and launched one of Israel’s promising biotech startups, Regentis Biomaterials.

Read more.

Prof. Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor of the Faculty of Medicine was on the international team that in 1998 first discovered the potential of stem cells to form any kind of tissue and pioneered stem-cell technology. The breakthrough garnered headlines around the world. He is the Director of the Technion Stem Cell Center.

By Vincent Zurawski, PhD

Iron Chelator-Based Neurodegenerative Drug for Treatment of Wound Infections and MDR BacteriaOccasionally, a chance alignment of circumstances can lead to an unexpected and highly productive outcome, one with the potential to induce a sea change in a particular field of endeavor. A novel small molecule called VK28, developed by Prof. Emeritus Moussa Youdim and his colleagues at the Technion and the late Prof. Abraham Warshawsky at the Weizmann Institute of Science, found its way to an unexpected collaborative research program involving Clinical Research Management contract researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and at Varinel, Inc., the company to which VK28 had been licensed for commercial development.

VK28 – also known as VAR10100 – was originally developed by Youdim, Varinel’s scientific founder, as a brain-selective and brain-permeable iron chelator, a chemical entity with the ability to bind up free iron. VK28 was designed to target treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. An iron chelator penetrating the blood-brain barrier might be expected to bind up and remove free iron from brain cells, providing a neuroprotective effect by eliminating an important source of tissue-damaging free radicals that can be stimulated by the presence of iron. Free radicals are highly reactive and can severely damage and even kill the very cells we use to think. Indeed, Youdim and colleagues showed that, in two animal models of Parkinson’s disease, VK28 was not only neuroprotective, but also neurorestorative and lowered the toxic brain iron that accumulates.

“The emergence of MDR bacterial strains has become a significant challenge for clinicians and caregivers.” During the product development process aimed at advancing VK28 to clinical trials, Varinel also developed a VK28 derivative called VAR10103 with potential as a drug candidate.

As luck would have it, my son, Daniel Zurawski, is a principal investigator and contracted at WRAIR to develop new therapies and preventive medicines for wound infections, especially those involving multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria. The emergence of MDR bacterial strains has become a significant challenge for clinicians and caregivers of the U.S. military as wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are often infected with bacteria that are resistant to most, if not all, current antibiotic treatment.

Because iron is an essential nutrient for all bacteria, including MDR bacteria, it was thought that treatment of wounds before or after a bacterial infection with an iron chelator alone or in conjunction with antibiotic therapy might provide the required antibacterial effect to keep infections in check. Sure enough, under the auspices of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Varinel and the U.S. Army and Department of Defense, both VK28 and VAR10103 have proven effective, in the laboratory, at stopping bacteria in their tracks, and they have proven to be synergistic with certain antibiotics in targeting MDR-resistant organisms. These results were presented at the 2011 ICAAC Meeting in Chicago. At WRAIR, both compounds are now being tested in animal models of infection along with some other iron chelators that showed promise in vitro.

The same chemical entities with the potential to protect brain cells may also provide the means to deliver a knock-out punch to bacteria that would otherwise elude treatment. It all begins with the kind of solid scientific effort that is traditional at the Technion, and which has led to its world recognition.

Dr Vincent Zurawski is Founding President of Varinel and its Chief Scientific Officer.

Disclaimer: The findings and opinions expressed herein belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the WRAIR, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

Cortica gets $7M to bestow computers with the power of sight.

Israeli startup Cortica raised $7 in a second round of funding. The investment was led by Horizons Ventures, owned by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing. Venture capitalist Ynon Kreiz also participated in the round, as did Ynon Kreiz, the former Chairman & CEO of the Endemol Group, the world’s largest independent television production company. The company had already raised $4 million from a group of high quality angel investors. Mr. Kreiz joins Cortica as its Chairman; founder Technion graduate Igal Raichelgauz continues as CEO.

Cortica’s image recognition technology fuses neuroscience and computer science by imbuing computers the ability to comprehend visual content on the web in real-time. The core technology was developed at Technion, in Haifa, Israel, by a team of neuroscientists and digital media experts. The technology functions similarly to the human cortex and can identify patterns, and make classifications.

Cortica was conceived in 2006 with a vision to fundamentally revolutionize the way computers understand images and video. The essence of Cortica’s Image2Text™ technology lies in its ability to automatically extract the core concepts in images and video, and map these concepts to key-words and textual taxonomies.

By virtue of their ability to simulate the appearance of the physical world, pictures drive interest, sentiment and commercial intent. Cortica’s product reads and automatically associates images with relevant ads. This groundbreaking model gives publishers a completely new monetization stream and provides brands and marketers the opportunity to reach highly targeted mass audiences.

Cortica was founded by Technion researchers, Prof. Yehoshua (Josh) Zeevi (Faculty of Electrical Engineering); Karina Odinaev; and engineer Igal Raichelgauz, who assembled a multi-disciplinary team of neuroscience researchers, digital multimedia experts and veterans of Israeli military intelligence to develop and commercialize the technology. The underlying technology was derived from scientific research focused on understanding how neural networks of the human cortex perform complex computational tasks, such as identifying patterns, classifying natural signals and understanding concepts.

Cortica’s commercial team will relocate to the US and will be based in NY with an office in Silicon Valley. The first commercial applications of the technology will transform advertising, search and image analytics

The Technion has an unmatched position within (and outside) Israel in neuro-engineering, and is recognized as a leader in the application of engineering methods and principles to the study of neural systems. Indeed, in addition to Cortica, several successful companies have stemmed from the Technion’s activity in this field (e.g., “BrainsGate”, “Elminda”, “GeneGrafts”, “Neurovibes”).

Image: LiveU Website

Technion graduates are bringing pictures of the 2012 London Olympics live to your homes. Going live with the 2012 Olympic games, the innovative Israel-born company LiveU introduced an innovative technology that allows a small device to use conventional mobile network signals to broadcast live events, as they happen.


The Technion brain-powered start-up already has a powerful global track record: it delivered live broadcasts of events such as the Royal Wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton; the 2011 Oscars and the Grammy Awards 2011; and the 2012 Super Bowl.