The Technion’s story has been intertwined with Israel’s for more than a century, from laying the foundations for a new nation to shaping its future.
An Israeli startup is on a mission to bring the benefit of natural sunlight indoors into our homes, workplaces and even hospitals. Solight addresses the issue of lack of sunlight in indoor spaces by creating a solar lighting system that takes the natural light of the morning and afternoon hours and channels it into desired spaces, providing health benefits to those stuck inside and cutting exposure to artificial light. The company was founded in 2012 by brothers Ofer and Dror Becker, who recognized the energy-saving advantages of sunlight but also realized that its health benefits shine brightest. Solight Founder and…
An estimated 200 million women suffer the pain of a “forgotten” disease. Endometriosis is, in many cases, triggered by their first period, and it’s likely to stay with them until menopause. It’s a chronic and progressive condition characterized by the growth of tiny lesions in the pelvic cavity. It’s the number one cause of infertility and can spread to other organs, sometimes with fatal consequences. It is, however, widely seen as a neglected disease. The symptoms – painful and heavy periods, pain during or after sex, pain going to the toilet during a period, difficulty getting pregnant – are easily…
The Israeli developer of a belt-like device that monitors the health of both a pregnant woman and her fetus has merged with a U.S. firm to create a new combined company. Nuvo’s FDA-cleared device INVU is worn around the belly of the expectant mother and uses central and acoustic sensors to measure fetal movements, fetal heart rate and maternal heart rate. The Tel Aviv-based company has merged with California-headquartered LAMF Global Ventures, and the new entity will retain the Nuvo name and existing operational and management structure. It will also be publicly traded on the NASDAQ Stock Market as NUVO,…
Imagine a lab being able to grow tissue from your own body to replace bone lost through damage or illness, and within a matter of weeks be able to fill the gap so well that once it was healed you would never know it had been there. Israeli medtech company Bonus Biogroup says it has created a way of doing just that – and aims to bring its tissue regeneration innovation to the market in the next couple of years. The company works in the fields of cell therapy and tissue engineering, growing live human tissue in vitro (outside of…
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) company Deci. According to estimates obtained by Calcalist, the value of the deal is $300 million. In Deci’s last fundraising round in July 2022, it was valued at an estimated $200 million. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close during the second quarter. Nvidia confirmed the deal to Calcalist, stating that “NVIDIA’s expertise in AI will be complemented by Deci’s capabilities in NAS, which automates the design of deep learning models to improve performance. Deci’s engineering team has knowledge in NAS, Foundational Models, Inference and in…
Doron Elad was only 25 years-old when he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Technion in 2018. He may be the youngest Ph.D. graduate in the University’s history. But this degree was only the beginning of his education. Today, he is a fourth-year medical student in the Technion’s Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. He intends to combine his expertise in mathematics with medicine to help people with mental illness. “My primary interests lie in the intersection between mathematics, computer science, statistics, and medicine,” he explained. “Roughly speaking, I am mainly interested in applying tools that are usually…
It’s not just humans – plants get stressed too. And like the rest of us, when they get stressed they tend to “shut down” and simply not produce. The most common kind, abiotic stress, is from intense heat or cold, prolonged dry spells or unhealthy levels of salinity due to rising sea levels and the intrusion of seawater into agricultural fields. How bad is it? More than 830 million hectares of agricultural land is now overly salty. Heat stress is expected to threaten nearly three-quarters of the world’s food production over the next 20 years, according to the research group Verisk…
Undergoing major gastrointestinal (GI) surgery can be challenging enough for a patient without the worry of a grave yet common aftereffect that requires urgent corrective surgery and a lengthy hospital stay – or worse. Israeli startup Exero Medical has come up with a way of keeping tabs on the surgical site after such a procedure, looking for a localized rupture that has hitherto been extremely difficult to detect. Every year, millions of people undergo surgery in the digestive tract – in most cases, for the removal of a part of the digestive system due to issues such as cancer or diverticulitis, Exero…
An Israeli foodtech startup that makes milk and other dairy products from mushrooms has partnered with one of America’s biggest biotech companies, Ginkgo Bioworks, to scale-up and produce affordable animal-free non-whey dairy products. Haifa-based ImaginDairy has bioengineered milk protein to create a wide range of dairy products using mushrooms but no cows. Through a process called precision fermentation, ImaginDairy recreates these milk proteins in the lab and can use them to generate any kind of dairy product. The partnership aims to improve cost-effective production of non-whey dairy proteins. Ginkgo will utilize its AI capabilities to create biological systems that reduce the cost of production,…
Globally, there is a persistent shortage of viable organs for transplantation. This unmet need has spurred the development of “engineered organs” — cultivated tissue that mimics the structure and function of livers, hearts, lungs and other vital viscera. While these in-vitro inside parts can be used to fill the gap in organ supply, it’s really hard to supply blood throughout the newly transplanted tissue. To solve this problem, Bonus Biogroup, an Israeli biotechnology company specializing in next-generation tissue regeneration therapies, has developed a method of producing a sophisticated network of artificial blood vessels that will enable reliable blood flow to transplanted artificial organs, drastically…
“Every time I’d bring him a project, he’d hand it back full of comments and tell me, ‘You can do better,’” said aerospace engineer Inbal Kreiss ’88, who fondly recalled that lesson learned as a student from Technion Professor Yeshayahu Talmon. And that advice helped shape her career. Kreiss, a graduate of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering, is today head of innovation at the Systems Missiles and Space Group of Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI), the nation’s prominent aerospace and aviation corporation. Since joining IAI in 2000, she has held leadership positions on projects that have contributed to Israel’s…
For more than 40 years, Avi Wigderson has studied problems. But as a computational complexity theorist, he doesn’t necessarily care about the answers to these problems. He often just wants to know if they’re solvable or not, and how to tell. “The situation is ridiculous,” said Wigderson, a computer scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. No matter how hard a question seems, an efficient way to answer it could be hiding just out of reach. “As far as we know, for every problem that we face and try to solve, we can’t rule out that…