Tag Archives: innovation

National Stamp Marks 100 years of Technion

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Israeli post gets smart with the Technion Centennial Stamp

The Israel Postal Company’s Philatelic Service is issuing a stamp celebrating the 100th anniversary of the cornerstone laying ceremony in Haifa of the Technion.


The new stamp will be unveiled as part of the Technion’s centennial activities, which will be launched on Tuesday President, Prof. Peretz Lavie, Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav and the postal authorities. 


The stamp shows a sketch of the old Technion building’s plans and the image of a nano parachute developed at the Technion at the lab of Prof. Eyal Zussman.  The Nanofiber technology recently led to the establishment of a prize-winning new company, NanoSpun through the T3 Technion Technology Transfer office. 


The Technion was Israel’s first academic institution and is today one of the most prominent in its field, Postal Company board chairman Sasii Shilo told the Jerusalem Post.


Ubiquitin gets ubiquitous through the post… Technion’s first Nobel Laureates in Chemistry were also honored last year by a stamp released to celebrate their discovery. Read the full story here.

National Stamp Marks 100 years of Technion

Leave a comment
Israeli post gets smart with the Technion Centennial Stamp

The Israel Postal Company’s Philatelic Service is issuing a stamp celebrating the 100th anniversary of the cornerstone laying ceremony in Haifa of the Technion.


The new stamp will be unveiled as part of the Technion’s centennial activities, which will be launched on Tuesday President, Prof. Peretz Lavie, Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav and the postal authorities. 


The stamp shows a sketch of the old Technion building’s plans and the image of a nano parachute developed at the Technion at the lab of Prof. Eyal Zussman.  The Nanofiber technology recently led to the establishment of a prize-winning new company, NanoSpun through the T3 Technion Technology Transfer office. 


The Technion was Israel’s first academic institution and is today one of the most prominent in its field, Postal Company board chairman Sasii Shilo told the Jerusalem Post.


Ubiquitin gets ubiquitous through the post… Technion’s first Nobel Laureates in Chemistry were also honored last year by a stamp released to celebrate their discovery. Read the full story here.

NANO Nutraceuticals – pioneering health.

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Nanocapsules developed by Technion researchers from natural materials can also be used by the pharmaceutical industry – in the protection of medicines in the stomach and their release in the intestine, as well as for targeting cancerous tumors

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Technion researchers have created nanocapsules that are based on natural food components, and trapped in them vitamins and nutraceuticals (health-enhancing micronutrients) that do not dissolve well in water. The nanocapsules can be added to clear beverages, thus increasing their health benefits without clouding them.
Dr. Yoav Livney and his team in the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering used the Maillard reaction to create nanocapsules based on the protein–polysaccharide conjugates. This natural reaction, which is the cause of the browning of food during baking and cooking, was used in the past in the creation of emulsions and microcapsules for nutrients that do not dissolve in water, but the problem with the existing methods is that the capsules obtained were large, so that they clouded the liquid they were added to.
To overcome this problem, Dr. Livney and his team conjugated maltodextrin, a product of the breakdown of starch into Casein, milk protein, in a controlled process. The conjugated molecules (conjugates) underwent spontaneous self-assembly into capsules of nanometric dimensions. These nanocapsules are so small, that the beverages they were added to remained clear.
In the next stage, the researchers trapped in the nanocapsules vitamin D (large parts of the population suffer from vitamin D deficiency, which could cause rickets in children and many other health disorders in adults). The research team found that the nanocapsules protect the vitamins “packed” in them. “They protected the vitamin D from degrading in an acidic environment, and during its refrigerated shelf-life”, says Dr. Livney. 
Another important material called EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate), that is found in green tea and that is considered to inhibit many diseases, among them are neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular diseases and cancer, was also significantly protected by the conjugates throughout its shelf-life.
The researchers also followed the release of the nutrients from the nanocapsules under simulated digestion conditions. They discovered that the nanocapsules succeeded in keeping the nutrients trapped in them, and in protecting them under stomach conditions. Livney believes that the enzymes in the small intestine will break the polysaccharide-protein envelope down easily, allowing the absorption of the nutritional nano-cargo at the desired location, in the small intestine.

In the future, Dr. Livney plans to “research the overall release profile of nutraceuticals through simulated digestion, and later to examine their bioavailability in vivo in clinical trials”. He adds that “we also intend to investigate the encapsulation by this method of other bio-active components, such as anti-cancer medicines.
Another team headed by Dr. Livney is currently developing the next generation of polysaccharide-protein conjugate-based nanocapsules, which are aimed at target-oriented delivery of medicines in the body, marking the location of cancerous tumors and destroying them.

Prior to becoming a faculty member in the Technion’s Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, Yoav Livney was involved in the development of “Gamadim”, “Ski” and “Symphony”, as part of his work as the product development manager of the cheese business unit at “Strauss”.

Nobel Prize Winning Ubiquitin in Action

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Proteologics’ pioneers targeted drug development CEO Joshua Levin discusses the molecules being developed with Teva and GlaxoSmithKline.[Extracted from Globes, Israel]

The award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Prof. Dan Schechtman, following the 2009 win by Prof. Ada Yonath, put the world of chemistry and Israel’s contributions to science that laypeople can barely understand in the limelight. Schechtman and Yonath have not yet turned their discoveries, of quasi-crystals and the mechanism of the ribosome, respectively, into commercial products, but their two Israeli predecessors, Prof. Aaron Ciechanover and Prof. Avram Hershko, the 2004 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, have succeeded in doing so (or at least trying). They contributed their know-how and reputations to Proteologics Ltd. (TASE: PRTL).

Ubiquitin – the new buzzword

To understand what Proteologics is doing, it is necessary to go back to high school chemistry and the stubborn teacher who tried to explain what a protein is. The company is developing targeted therapeutics for the ubiquitin system, which regulates almost all aspects of eukaryotic cellular function, including cell cycle regulation, DNA repair, signal transduction, immune response, protein quality control and metabolism. The system comprises about 1,000 protiens.
Hershko and Ciechanover discovered the ubiquitin system in 1978, and jointly won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004 for the discovery. They are both members of Proteologics’ science advisory board.
Targeted medications are not regular drugs; as their name implies, they have just one specific target, and are consequently more effective, (improving a patient’s quality of life by reducing the side effects of treatment) and are more efficient for health funds by cutting costs. These drugs discover the proteins that play an important role in a disease, neutralizing which leads to improvement, even a cure, for the disease in question.
A ubiquitin is a small regulatory protein that can be attached to proteins and label them for destruction for the proper function of the cell. Ubiquitin tags can also direct proteins to other locations in the cell, where they control other protein and cell mechanisms. Disruption of the ubiquitin system is therefore liable to cause a wide range of diseases, including cancers, diseases of the nervous system such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, and viral diseases.
Drug development is complicated, and the difficulties are compounded in the case of the ubiquitin system. It is a hierarchal cascade system with three levels: The E1 enzyme is a single protein, which can bind with the subordinate level, E2 enzymes (of which there are about 40), which in turn influence the more than 600 E3 enzymes.
This hierarchal cascade and the multiple E2-E3 connections complicates the drug development task. E3 enzymes directly transfer the signal to the protein, and this is where Proteologics finds the proteins that are the basis for its therapeutics. Any intervention higher up in the hierarchy is liable to cause harm rather than help.
Business model: spread the risk
Proteologics’ business model may prove in future to be much more effective than the models of other R&D companies. The drug development and approval process has three main stages. First is identification of the target and development of a suitable molecule, which is followed by preclinical and human clinical trials.
Proteologics only operates at the first and second stages, while the final stage, which requires more time and financial investment, is handled by the company’s big pharma partners – Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Nasdaq: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) and GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE; LSE: GSK).
In this way, Proteologics reduces its financial risk, as the clinical trial and most expensive stage is carried out by big pharma companies which bear the financial risk. Proteologics even receives advances for R&D costs, which are partly covered by its partners. The company also has an option for receiving milestone payments, and will receive generous royalties from sales, assuming that the drug is approved for marketing.
Until that day comes, if it ever does, Proteologics can use the milestone payments to pursue additional projects on the basis of the platform it developed for working with E3 enzymes with different tags. This enables the company to survive, in theory, for a long time as it expands its knowledge and its platform to create a large enough product base that will increase its chances of turning at least one of its drug candidates into a commercial product.
Proteologics CEO Joshua Levin says that it has been able to lower its risk profile by choosing two partners that complements each other, in both character and terms of the agreements signed with them. GlaxoSmithKline, a UK giant with a market cap of $117 billion, is developing with Proteologics six programs for the treatment of various cancers (each program is based on a different E3 enzyme). Teva is jointly developing three programs. Proteologics is also developing two programs independently, and will either continue to do so or find a partner.
“GlaxoSmithKline and Teva complement each other,” says Levin. “Teva is not an innovative company, which is why it chose to invest a little in us now, and give us a larger share of revenue from drug sales. GlaxoSmithKline, in contrast, chose to invest much more in us at the first and second stages, and took a greater share for itself when the drug reaches market.”
In the case of GlaxoSmithKline, which is the more important partner for Levin, each program could generate up to $176 million in royalties, or up to $1 billion altogether, but Levin is realistic about these numbers. “This isn’t a real number. There’s no chance that all six drugs will be commercialized,” he says.

2012 is the critical year

Under Proteologics’ timetable, 2012 will be a critical year. Teva, which has undergone quite a few changes, mainly as a result of its acquisition of Cephalon, is scheduled to receive its first molecule from Proteologics within months, and will have to decide whether it wants to pursue development. If it chooses not to do so, Proteologics can continue development (a Phase I clinical trial) independently, or find another partner, without the need to start the development process from scratch.
Levin is not worried that either Teva or GlaxoSmithKline will return molecules to the company, but he is nonetheless doing everything to make sure that does not happen. In the case of GlaxoSmithKline, each program has a three-year timeframe, which means that in early 2013, Proteologics will have to hand over the first molecule to it and wait for a response.
Read full article at Globes

Nobel Prize Winning Ubiquitin in Action

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Proteologics’ pioneers targeted drug development CEO Joshua Levin discusses the molecules being developed with Teva and GlaxoSmithKline.[Extracted from Globes, Israel]

The award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Prof. Dan Schechtman, following the 2009 win by Prof. Ada Yonath, put the world of chemistry and Israel’s contributions to science that laypeople can barely understand in the limelight. Schechtman and Yonath have not yet turned their discoveries, of quasi-crystals and the mechanism of the ribosome, respectively, into commercial products, but their two Israeli predecessors, Prof. Aaron Ciechanover and Prof. Avram Hershko, the 2004 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, have succeeded in doing so (or at least trying). They contributed their know-how and reputations to Proteologics Ltd. (TASE: PRTL).

Ubiquitin – the new buzzword

To understand what Proteologics is doing, it is necessary to go back to high school chemistry and the stubborn teacher who tried to explain what a protein is. The company is developing targeted therapeutics for the ubiquitin system, which regulates almost all aspects of eukaryotic cellular function, including cell cycle regulation, DNA repair, signal transduction, immune response, protein quality control and metabolism. The system comprises about 1,000 protiens.
Hershko and Ciechanover discovered the ubiquitin system in 1978, and jointly won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004 for the discovery. They are both members of Proteologics’ science advisory board.
Targeted medications are not regular drugs; as their name implies, they have just one specific target, and are consequently more effective, (improving a patient’s quality of life by reducing the side effects of treatment) and are more efficient for health funds by cutting costs. These drugs discover the proteins that play an important role in a disease, neutralizing which leads to improvement, even a cure, for the disease in question.
A ubiquitin is a small regulatory protein that can be attached to proteins and label them for destruction for the proper function of the cell. Ubiquitin tags can also direct proteins to other locations in the cell, where they control other protein and cell mechanisms. Disruption of the ubiquitin system is therefore liable to cause a wide range of diseases, including cancers, diseases of the nervous system such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, and viral diseases.
Drug development is complicated, and the difficulties are compounded in the case of the ubiquitin system. It is a hierarchal cascade system with three levels: The E1 enzyme is a single protein, which can bind with the subordinate level, E2 enzymes (of which there are about 40), which in turn influence the more than 600 E3 enzymes.
This hierarchal cascade and the multiple E2-E3 connections complicates the drug development task. E3 enzymes directly transfer the signal to the protein, and this is where Proteologics finds the proteins that are the basis for its therapeutics. Any intervention higher up in the hierarchy is liable to cause harm rather than help.
Business model: spread the risk
Proteologics’ business model may prove in future to be much more effective than the models of other R&D companies. The drug development and approval process has three main stages. First is identification of the target and development of a suitable molecule, which is followed by preclinical and human clinical trials.
Proteologics only operates at the first and second stages, while the final stage, which requires more time and financial investment, is handled by the company’s big pharma partners – Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Nasdaq: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) and GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE; LSE: GSK).
In this way, Proteologics reduces its financial risk, as the clinical trial and most expensive stage is carried out by big pharma companies which bear the financial risk. Proteologics even receives advances for R&D costs, which are partly covered by its partners. The company also has an option for receiving milestone payments, and will receive generous royalties from sales, assuming that the drug is approved for marketing.
Until that day comes, if it ever does, Proteologics can use the milestone payments to pursue additional projects on the basis of the platform it developed for working with E3 enzymes with different tags. This enables the company to survive, in theory, for a long time as it expands its knowledge and its platform to create a large enough product base that will increase its chances of turning at least one of its drug candidates into a commercial product.
Proteologics CEO Joshua Levin says that it has been able to lower its risk profile by choosing two partners that complements each other, in both character and terms of the agreements signed with them. GlaxoSmithKline, a UK giant with a market cap of $117 billion, is developing with Proteologics six programs for the treatment of various cancers (each program is based on a different E3 enzyme). Teva is jointly developing three programs. Proteologics is also developing two programs independently, and will either continue to do so or find a partner.
“GlaxoSmithKline and Teva complement each other,” says Levin. “Teva is not an innovative company, which is why it chose to invest a little in us now, and give us a larger share of revenue from drug sales. GlaxoSmithKline, in contrast, chose to invest much more in us at the first and second stages, and took a greater share for itself when the drug reaches market.”
In the case of GlaxoSmithKline, which is the more important partner for Levin, each program could generate up to $176 million in royalties, or up to $1 billion altogether, but Levin is realistic about these numbers. “This isn’t a real number. There’s no chance that all six drugs will be commercialized,” he says.

2012 is the critical year

Under Proteologics’ timetable, 2012 will be a critical year. Teva, which has undergone quite a few changes, mainly as a result of its acquisition of Cephalon, is scheduled to receive its first molecule from Proteologics within months, and will have to decide whether it wants to pursue development. If it chooses not to do so, Proteologics can continue development (a Phase I clinical trial) independently, or find another partner, without the need to start the development process from scratch.
Levin is not worried that either Teva or GlaxoSmithKline will return molecules to the company, but he is nonetheless doing everything to make sure that does not happen. In the case of GlaxoSmithKline, each program has a three-year timeframe, which means that in early 2013, Proteologics will have to hand over the first molecule to it and wait for a response.
Read full article at Globes

How start-ups get started. Israel, NYC & TCII

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Silicon Island: a NYC hub for technology transfer

“We are glad to have the opportunity to join forces with Cornell University, to tap into the already rich innovative New York based eco-system and share our tech-transfer practices, insights and methodologies”

One of the most significant global academic milestones of this century must be the decision announced on December 19th 2011 by New York Mayor Bloomberg of Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology as winners in a $2 billion competition to build a science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. The planned campus aims to serve 2,500 students and 280 faculty by 2043. It also intends to boost the number of graduate engineering students in the area by 70 percent. For the first time in history, the new academic venture will be called an institute of “Innovation”.

For Technion scientists patenting new technologies and looking at commercialization, TCII represents a foothold in New York City which is vital for global commercialization and networking. US investors will also have a domestic gateway to emerging technologies from Israel’s top powerhouse of innovation.

Included in plans for TCII (the Technion Cornell Institute of Innovation), is a $150 million fund to spawn New York area startups. The move comes on the heels of plans from IBM, Intel and others to participate in a $4.4 billion New York state effort to develop semiconductor technology for 450mm wafers.

“The message we are sending with this announcement is: look out Silicon Valley, look out Boston, New York will be second to none,” stated U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer.

The campus will be organized around three interdisciplinary hubs: Connective Media, Healthier Life, and the Built Environment. Cornell will immediately offer Master and Doctoral degrees in areas such as Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Information Science and Engineering. In addition, after receiving the required accreditation, the campus will also offer innovative Technion-Cornell dual Master of Applied Sciences degrees. The concept of organizing TCII into multidiciplinary ‘hubs’ was introduced by the Technion, based on its successful multidisciplinary research centers, such as the Grand Technion Energy Program, says Technion President Peretz Lavie.

The TCII Campus will host entrepreneurs-in-residence, organize business competitions, provide legal support for startups, reach out to existing companies to form research partnerships and sponsor research, and establish a pre-seed financing program to support promising research. In addition, the campus will structure its tech transfer office, which will be on-site, to facilitate startup formation and technology licensing. The TCII Campus will also establish a $150 million revolving financing fund that will be solely devoted to start-up businesses in new York City.

“Starting today, we are going to put our plan to work, tapping into our extensive connections throughout the city and build a truly 21st Century campus to fuel the creation of new businesses and new industries throughout the city for decades to come.

“Technology Transfer activity takes place at the Technion in many shapes and forms resulting in significant economic development both locally and nationally,” says manager of the Technion Technology Transfer Office ( T3 ) Benjamin Soffer. “We are glad to have the opportunity to join forces with Cornell University, tap into the already rich innovative New York based eco-system and share our tech-transfer practices, insights  and methodologies to the benefit of the state of New York and the US at large.” 

IP (intellectual property) coming out of the TCII will be held jointly by Cornell University and Technion.

According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Technion has a world-class track-record in research, development and entrepreneurship. The Technion’s departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are considered among the best in the world. It  boasts top ranking faculty members including Nobel laureates. The Technion has long been considered a driving force behind Israel’s emergence as one of the world’s great centers of technology.

“Israel’s heros used to be the generals; now, the heros are the entrepreneurs.”

Technion  T3 Manager Benjamin Soffer,

Israel today has one of the highest concentrations of high-tech start-up companies globally. In partnership with a strong community of incubators, private investors, venture capitalists, angel groups and entrepreneurs, the Technion’s tech transfer arm, Technion Technology Transfer ( T3 ), has filed an average of 300 new patents each year and annually nurtures innovative startups in sectors such as clean-tech, cell therapy, drug delivery, nanotechnology and others. Companies including Intel, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Yahoo! and Hewlett-Packard have established major operations near or on the Technion campus. Only this month, Apple announced that it will be joining the others to set up a ground-breaking R&D Center near Technion City – to be headed by Technion graduate Aharon Aharon.

Technion graduates currently head nearly half of the 121 Israeli companies on the NASDAQ, which have a combined market value of over $28 billion. More than 70 percent of the Technion graduates are employed in the high technology sectors that drive Israel’s economic growth.  Presently, Israeli companies headed by the Technion graduates employ 85 percent of Israel’s technical workforce.  According to a recent article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, there are approximately 4,000 start-up companies located around the Technion’s home campus.

President Lavie addresses press. NYC, 19th December, 2011

With the selection of Cornell/Technion now complete, the project is scheduled to move into the environmental and land use review process, expected to be completed by the fall of 2013. Groundbreaking on the first phase of the Roosevelt Island campus is expected by the beginning of 2015. A temporary off-site campus will be open in 2012.

The Birth of Super Resolution – Technion Startup in HD!

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A clear-cut example of the dynamic process of technology transfer at the Technion – the startup BETTERview is slated to revolutionize the quality of HD imaging – by taking and applying new research from the Technion department of electrical engineering all the way to your the screen of your TV, PC or smart phone. Have something old and cloudy? BETTERvIew also offers a conversion service to produce images as crisp as if they were filmed with the cutting-edge cameras of tomorrow.


BETTERView offers SD to true HD (High Definition) conversion and video enrichment. Check the following video to see the quality advantage.




The patented breakthrough in the super resolution promises to breaks the “glass ceiling” of existing technology, says the company, whose team includes world-experts from Technion’s Faculty of Computer Science, which is ranked #15 in the world. While conventional methods use conversion techniques to “blow up” or stretch the SD video onto an HD display, BetterVirw increases optical resolution of a video stream, generating an HD stream that looks as authentic as it gets.


BETTERview technology is based on a novel family of SR algorithms, proposed by a world-leader in this field, Prof. Michael Elad (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology). Elad and his collaborator, Dr. Matan Protter devised the first method that overcomes the requirement for very accurate and explicit motion estimation in previous SR technologies. The new family of SR techniques avoids the exact motion estimation and replaces it by a probabilistic estimate. This enables handling successfully general content scenes containing extremely complex motion patterns. 


The results are impressive, with no visual artifacts, and the process is completely robust. Based on this core technology, BETTERview developed the first cutting-edge industrial-grade robust system that perform SD to True HD resolution conversion. Its solution strengthens the above-mentioned core technology by handling various video artifacts, interlaced content, synchronization issues and run-time efficiency.


The innovative research of Prof. Michael Elad was listed in 2010 by Thomson Reuters Science Watch. You can read their interview with him here.



It has been known for the past 20 years that, in principle, one could take several low-quality images and fuse them into a single, higher-resolution outcome. This has been demonstrated by scientists, adopting various techniques and algorithms. The process is known as Super-Resolution (SR), which  became a hot field in image processing, with thousands of academic papers published during the past two decades on the problem and ways to handle it. The classical approach to fuse the low-quality images requires finding an exact correspondence between their pixels, a process known as “motion estimation”. Several years ago this field experienced a revolution, due to a breakthrough in the way to handle (or better yet, bypass altogether) the motion estimation. 

The Birth of Super Resolution – Technion Startup in HD!

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A clear-cut example of the dynamic process of technology transfer at the Technion – the startup BETTERview is slated to revolutionize the quality of HD imaging – by taking and applying new research from the Technion department of electrical engineering all the way to your the screen of your TV, PC or smart phone. Have something old and cloudy? BETTERvIew also offers a conversion service to produce images as crisp as if they were filmed with the cutting-edge cameras of tomorrow.


BETTERView offers SD to true HD (High Definition) conversion and video enrichment. Check the following video to see the quality advantage.




The patented breakthrough in the super resolution promises to breaks the “glass ceiling” of existing technology, says the company, whose team includes world-experts from Technion’s Faculty of Computer Science, which is ranked #15 in the world. While conventional methods use conversion techniques to “blow up” or stretch the SD video onto an HD display, BetterVirw increases optical resolution of a video stream, generating an HD stream that looks as authentic as it gets.


BETTERview technology is based on a novel family of SR algorithms, proposed by a world-leader in this field, Prof. Michael Elad (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology). Elad and his collaborator, Dr. Matan Protter devised the first method that overcomes the requirement for very accurate and explicit motion estimation in previous SR technologies. The new family of SR techniques avoids the exact motion estimation and replaces it by a probabilistic estimate. This enables handling successfully general content scenes containing extremely complex motion patterns. 


The results are impressive, with no visual artifacts, and the process is completely robust. Based on this core technology, BETTERview developed the first cutting-edge industrial-grade robust system that perform SD to True HD resolution conversion. Its solution strengthens the above-mentioned core technology by handling various video artifacts, interlaced content, synchronization issues and run-time efficiency.


The innovative research of Prof. Michael Elad was listed in 2010 by Thomson Reuters Science Watch. You can read their interview with him here.



It has been known for the past 20 years that, in principle, one could take several low-quality images and fuse them into a single, higher-resolution outcome. This has been demonstrated by scientists, adopting various techniques and algorithms. The process is known as Super-Resolution (SR), which  became a hot field in image processing, with thousands of academic papers published during the past two decades on the problem and ways to handle it. The classical approach to fuse the low-quality images requires finding an exact correspondence between their pixels, a process known as “motion estimation”. Several years ago this field experienced a revolution, due to a breakthrough in the way to handle (or better yet, bypass altogether) the motion estimation. 

The future: knife-free non-invasive cancer surgery.

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Insightec – voted a top innovator by TIME Magazine for its revolutionary ultrasound system for non-invasive surgery, is a powerhouse of Technion graduates. Here, Yoav Medan, who has taught at the department of electrical engineering at the Technion and who has graduated from there in aeronautical engineering, discusses how this patented Israeli system could soon be saving lives across the planet.

Imagine having a surgery with no knives involved. At TEDMED, surgeon Yoav Medan shares a technique that uses MRI to find trouble spots and focused ultrasound to treat such issues as brain lesions, uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths.

‘TIME’ honors InSightec’s Focused Ultrasound

By Viva Sarah Press
December 06, 2011
TIME magazine recently called InSightec’s MR Guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS) one of the 50 best inventions of the year.

“Magnetic-resonance-imaging (MRI) and ultrasound technologies are each remarkable in their own right, but combine them and you get something life-changing,” the magazine wrote about InSightec’s technique.

Read full story at Israel 21C

Yoav Medan

Vice President and Chief Systems Architect, Insightec

Yoav Medan, Vice President and Chief Systems Architect, is responsible for developing new platforms for the Magnetic Resonance guided Focused Ultrasound technology.
Prior to joining InSightec in 1999, Dr. Medan spent 17 years in various senior research and management positions at the IBM Research Division and was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology.
In addition to technical and managerial experience, Dr. Medan has academic experience as well, teaching at the EE department at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in addition to serving as a lecturer for Avionic Systems at the Aeronautical Engineering faculty. He is also a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Dr. Medan has widely published and holds nine IBM as well as several other patents. He was awarded the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, the 3rd Invention Achievement Award and the Outstanding Research Division Award.
Dr. Medan received his D.Sc. and B.Sc.(Summa Cum Laude) in Aeronautical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a M.B.A diploma from Bradford University, UK.

The focused ultrasound beam can be seen during the treatment to ensure taht the ultrasound travels through a safe pathway to the focus. This ensures that the correct region is targeted.  Sonication parameters can be adjusted to optimize the treatment and are monitored by the physician during the treatment.

The future: knife-free non-invasive cancer surgery.

5 Comments
Insightec – voted a top innovator by TIME Magazine for its revolutionary ultrasound system for non-invasive surgery, is a powerhouse of Technion graduates. Here, Yoav Medan, who has taught at the department of electrical engineering at the Technion and who has graduated from there in aeronautical engineering, discusses how this patented Israeli system could soon be saving lives across the planet.

Imagine having a surgery with no knives involved. At TEDMED, surgeon Yoav Medan shares a technique that uses MRI to find trouble spots and focused ultrasound to treat such issues as brain lesions, uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths.

‘TIME’ honors InSightec’s Focused Ultrasound

By Viva Sarah Press
December 06, 2011
TIME magazine recently called InSightec’s MR Guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS) one of the 50 best inventions of the year.

“Magnetic-resonance-imaging (MRI) and ultrasound technologies are each remarkable in their own right, but combine them and you get something life-changing,” the magazine wrote about InSightec’s technique.

Read full story at Israel 21C

Yoav Medan

Vice President and Chief Systems Architect, Insightec

Yoav Medan, Vice President and Chief Systems Architect, is responsible for developing new platforms for the Magnetic Resonance guided Focused Ultrasound technology.
Prior to joining InSightec in 1999, Dr. Medan spent 17 years in various senior research and management positions at the IBM Research Division and was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology.
In addition to technical and managerial experience, Dr. Medan has academic experience as well, teaching at the EE department at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in addition to serving as a lecturer for Avionic Systems at the Aeronautical Engineering faculty. He is also a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Dr. Medan has widely published and holds nine IBM as well as several other patents. He was awarded the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, the 3rd Invention Achievement Award and the Outstanding Research Division Award.
Dr. Medan received his D.Sc. and B.Sc.(Summa Cum Laude) in Aeronautical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a M.B.A diploma from Bradford University, UK.

The focused ultrasound beam can be seen during the treatment to ensure taht the ultrasound travels through a safe pathway to the focus. This ensures that the correct region is targeted.  Sonication parameters can be adjusted to optimize the treatment and are monitored by the physician during the treatment.