Imagine you walk into the office of your doctor. You have been suffering from heartburn, and are worried, as your uncles both died of heart disease. The doctor takes a sample, and within twenty minutes can give you a genetic read-out – you will know where the worry is, what is needed, which medications will work and which will be ineffective or with dangerous side effects. You will know if you are at risk or if heartburn just suggests less fried foods. General medicine has undergone a revolution.

The above scenario would be just one outcome of the coming revolution in medical diagnostics, says Prof. Amit Meller. The efficient, fast and highly effective genome sequencing platforms of the future will impact scientific research across the frontiers, creating undreamed of possibilities for the treatments and drug developments of tomorrow. Meller’s company, NobleGen Biosciences is active in producing such tools for the next generation of medical treatment and research. And at Meller’s two labs at the Lorry I. Lokey Center for Life Science & Engineering at Technion and at Boston University, the integrated science and engineering teams are developing technologies relevant to the life sciences of tomorrow.

“My hope is that the way disease will be diagnosed in the next decades will be different from what we have been doing so far,” says Meller. “There is a convergence of multiple technologies involving information processing knowledge on the genomic level and the ability to process a very small number of cells. The biomolecular diagnostic companies are looking towards a transition to tools that rely on ultra-fast genome analyses, to be used in any clinic. We will have the research tools and knowledge to look at a person’s genome and to choose the most efficient drugs. It’s just a matter of bringing those technologies to the diagnostic market.”

One of the key attractions of the Lokey Center, says Meller, is that he saw it would be possible to integrate two sides of himself – and two important strains of life science research – basic science and applied engineering. As a freshmen student at Tel AvivUniversity, he remembers, he was unable to choose between physics (how to understand things better) and engineering (how to make things better). Today, as a worldclass scientist with active labs both at Technion and Boston University, he knows that both are critical. “We are living in extremely exciting times with respect to how science is done,” says Meller, who has nine patents in life sciences to his name, seven of which are already licensed.

As such, he is handpicking just the right mix of multidisciplinary scientists for his research group in Israel. “We want to be both useful and exciting. The combination of basic and applied science makes the experience of research much more enriching and interesting.

Students from the biophysics side will always be challenged by the engineers… who know they can do it better. And when an engineer presents a better method– for example, for reading an RNA transcript, the scientist will challenge him with ‘where is the question? Is it worthwhile pursuing?’ I really enjoy this kind of multidisciplinary intellectual interactions – a positive tension – among colleagues in the same group.”

Take a look into the lab complex of Prof. Amit Meller at the Emerson Family Life Sciences Building and breath in the future. An integrated synergy of biology, physics and engineering; a structure set up to support seamless global collaboration; and pioneering multidisciplinary science that is set to revolutionize the medicine of tomorrow. From the shining white infrastructure for biological research, through electric doors to the darkened, silent halls of advanced molecular physics, this top recruit of the Lokey Center signifies the first frontier of pure science and engineering in the third millennium. “We have something unique to offer. I wanted to focus my impact at the intersection of engineering and life sciences. When I heard about the Lokey Center, I immediately realized that this is something I could profoundly identify with.”

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