But for many who find themselves facing the greatest battle of all – for their health – Israeli companies have developed truly life-changing medical technology. 

We take a look at some of the most significant innovations, which have the potential to really make the world a better and healthier place. 

Freezing Out Cancer 

IceCure Medical’s ProSense system does what the name of the company suggests – freezing tumors as a treatment for early-stage breast, lung, liver and kidney cancers. 

Doctors insert a small needle into the tumor, using liquid nitrogen to freeze it to temperatures as low as -170°C, without harming the healthy tissue that surrounds it. The cells die as they thaw, and are then absorbed by the body.

The system can be used in a doctor’s own surgery with no invasive treatment or general anesthetic, involving no hospitalization or tissue removal that can cause scarring. The ice ball also has an analgesic effect, providing additional numbing and pain relief to the treated area.

Today, ProSense currently has regulatory approval in 15 countries, including Canada, the United States and China.

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Wheelchair That Puts Users Back On Their Feet  

The wife of inventor and entrepreneur Dr. Amit Goffer cried when she saw him standing on his own feet for the first time, after almost two decades in a wheelchair, thanks to his UpnRide development.  

The unique mobility device gives users the freedom to sit, stand and travel in an upright position, and can lift the user from a sitting to a standing position – and back again – unaided.

Goffer had lost the use of both legs and some movement in his arms when he broke his neck in an ATV accident in 1997, He had already invented the “bionic” ReWalk, a wearable device that allows paraplegics to walk again, and then began developing a solution for people who did not have the upper-body function it requires.  

And unlike other similar solutions on the market, FDA-approved UpnRide’s sophisticated technology allows the user to travel upright at 4km per hour regardless of terrain, tackling almost all urban environments. Click here for more

Delivering An IVF Baby Boom 

Israel loves babies. It is the only developed nation on the planet with an above-average number of births per woman and is by far the world leader in IVF procedures. 

So it is hardly surprising that a major revolution in the efficacy of IVF treatments should be Israeli. 

Tel Aviv-based startup AIVF uses artificial intelligence to select the embryo with the best chance of being successfully implanted into a woman’s womb. 

Using massive amounts of biological data, the EMA platform was trained to understand developmental biology in order to detect milestones and parameters in a developing embryo. 

The founders created the platform based on the premise that AI would be better than the human eye at the “crucial point“ of evaluating embryos in the lab and determining which of a woman’s fertilized eggs was most likely to be viable. 

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Tiny Camera Is Canceling Colonoscopies   

Perhaps the most famous of Israeli medtech developments, the PillCam is a non-invasive method of detecting disorders in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. 

Developed by Given Imaging (today owned by American multinational Medtronic), the pill-sized camera is ingested by patients, which allows physicians to visualize the esophagus, colon and areas of the small intestine. This is vital for detecting diseases including Crohn’s, obscure gastrointestinal bleeding (OGIB) and even esophageal cancer.

After a 10-hour fast, patients swallow the PillCam that then passes naturally through the digestive system over an eight-hour period. During that time PillCam transmits approximately 50,000 images, which can then be downloaded and reviewed by the physician.  

The pill also costs around $800, making it far cheaper than a colonoscopy that can come with a price tag of more than $4,000 and is often far more uncomfortable. 

Since acquiring Given Imaging, Medtronic has opened development centers in Jerusalem and Yokneam, where it employs around 750 people. 

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Predicting Strokes With Sensors

Prevention, as the saying goes, is better than a cure, and Avertto’s groundbreaking wearable device alerts people to the dangers of an imminent stroke before it even happens. 

The first-ever device of its kind uses cutting-edge pulse wave analysis technology to monitor changes in the blood flow to the brain through the carotid artery, allowing immediate medical steps to be taken to mitigate the risk. 

Strokes are most commonly caused by a clot blocking the essential supply of blood to the brain, and according to the World Health Organization are the second leading cause of death and the leading cause of disability across the globe. 

Avertto’s device uses sensors placed over the carotid arteries, the two major blood vessels on either side of the neck that provide the blood supply to the brain.

A lower blood flow level indicates potential blockages in the carotid arteries. The device’s AI-based alert system detects these changes and within seconds notifies the wearer, first responders and healthcare providers. 

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AI Platform Makes Snappy Work Of Diabetic Eye Test

A store-bought camera and a revolutionary AI platform have made simple work of one of the seemingly endless list of tests required by diabetics to monitor their health – with minimum discomfort and in a convenient setting.  

AEYE Health’s proprietary software analyzes an image of the eye for diabetic retinopathy – damage to the blood vessels in the retina that can lead to blindness – without having to dilate the pupil in an uncomfortable and incapacitating procedure. 

Building the platform, which uses machine learning, involved collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data in order to understand how to differentiate between patients whose eyes needed no immediate further care and those who required a referral to an ophthalmologist. 

The method can be used by a family doctor at a pharmacy or even in a patient’s own home, and yields immediate results, avoiding the discomfort and inconvenience that deters many people from having the crucial annual test. 

So remarkable is the development that AEYE Health CEO Zack Dvey-Aharon was recently named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence for 2024. 

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Mapping Endometriosis Without Surgery 

Women suffering from endometriosis – when tissue similar to the womb lining grows as “lesions” on other parts of the body – have traditionally had to undergo painful and invasive surgery to properly assess the extent of the debilitating disease.  

So challenging has been the detection of the disease, Yale Medicine says that it takes between four to 11 years from the onset of symptoms to diagnosis and treatment.  

But femtech startup EndoCure has developed an AI-powered ultrasound platform for comprehensive mapping of the lesions, leading to quicker diagnosis and customized treatment options for the one in 10 women of reproductive age worldwide who suffer from endometriosis. 

The lesions appear primarily on the ovaries, bowel and other areas of the pelvic region, causing severe pain and affecting fertility. 

EndoCure’s system integrates with standard ultrasound equipment, streaming the data using its own software as the area is scanned.  It produces 3D imaging that is able to detect lesions smaller than one millimeter, which are extremely hard for current systems to spot.

Click here for more

An honorable mention also goes to femtech startup Gynica, which has developed a treatment for endometriosis with cannabinoids, the main component in the cannabis plant. 

The startup’s proprietary slow-release suppository makes use of cannabinoids’ anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties, as well as their ability to deter the movement of the endometrium cells to different parts of the body in a three-fold treatment that tackles different aspects of endometriosis. Click here for more

The post Israeli Medical Technologies That Could Change The World appeared first on NoCamels.

Jerusalem-based Metabolize is using two small molecules known as metabolites, which are produced in the body in response to exercise, intermittent fasting and a ketogenic (low-carbohydrate, high-fat) diet.  

These two metabolites, Metabolize founder and CEO Morris Laster tells NoCamels, reduce both appetite and weight like GLP-1 medications, but are less aggressive and do not share their unfortunate side effects. 

The GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) family of drugs is used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, and includes now-famous brands such as Ozempic and Wegovy. But many people who take these drugs experience unpleasant side effects such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

According to Metabolize, the GLP-1 side effects are so bad that more than 80 percent of people taking the drugs stop the treatment within the first year and many regain whatever weight they had lost.

Furthermore, Laster explains, because the two metabolites actually target different areas in the brain than GLP-1s, they do not have an adverse impact on the pleasure centers by triggering another unpleasant side effect – a phenomenon known as anhedonia or lack of enjoyment. 

Obesity is a rapidly growing problem across the globe. The World Health Organization says that by 2022, some 890 million adults (one in eight people) on the planet were living with obesity – a number that had more than doubled since 1990. 

And for adolescents aged five to 19 years the situation is even more grave, with the number of young people living with obesity quadrupling to 160 million in the same period – bringing the total number of people of all ages living with obesity to over one billion.  

Metabolize believes its metabolites solution could be a game changer, particularly as it is taken orally and not injected, and is classed by the US Food and Drug Administration as a “new dietary ingredient” rather than medication. 

This means that it can be used in foods and accessed over the counter without a prescription once it has successfully completed a checklist of animal toxicology studies. 

“You can use it as an ingredient in protein bars, drinks and functional foods,” Laster says. “So you can basically have a healthy snack, and it’ll reduce your appetite along the way.” 

Although the company was only established in June of this year, the story of Metabolize’s metabolites solution began two years ago, when Laster, a medical doctor and veteran biomedical entrepreneur, became aware of an article in the Nature journal about the N-lactoyl-phenylalanine (Lac-Phe) metabolite, which has a weight loss effect and actually increases in the body due to intense exercise. 

Laster reached out to the scientist who discovered the metabolite, Prof. Jonathan Long of Stanford University, who told him that Lac-Phe had to be injected to supplement the body’s own production of the molecule, but he was actually working on another compound – X-Phe – that had the same impact as Lac-Phe but could be taken orally. 

While Laster began the process to obtain the license for X-Phe from Stanford, Long informed him that he was working on a third metabolite – N-acetyltaurine (NAT) – that had a similar effect and could also be ingested. And together, X-Phe and NAT could lead to weight loss of up to 20 percent without the side effects of GLP-1 medications and without influencing the pleasure center in the brain. 

Laster obtained the licenses for both X-Phe and NAT and so Metabolize, which is also registered in the US State of Delaware, was born. 

The company is now working on achieving the FDA’s new dietary ingredient designation. Laster explains that because it is classed as a supplement rather than a medication, the designation cuts down the timeline for entry to market from a decade to 18 months, and the cost from around a billion dollars to three or four million.  

“You’re talking about a big difference in terms of investment, but the outcome is pretty much the same,” he says. 

Metabolize hopes to meet the FDA requirements and commercialize the supplement by 2026, either selling it over the counter through a B2C model, or license out it to food manufacturers to develop in foods, bars or protein drinks. 

“Essentially, you have a healthy snack that is also involved in reducing weight,” says Laster. 

The post Harnessing Our Own Bodies For Side Effect-Free Weight Loss appeared first on NoCamels.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the disease was responsible for an estimated 1.8 million deaths in 2020 alone, which the American Cancer Society reports is more than breast, colorectal and prostate cancers combined.  

A team of researchers from the Faculty of Biology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have been investigating the molecular mechanisms that protect cells from DNA damage, which can be caused by radiation, smoking or other factors. 

And because the failure of these protective mechanisms to repair damaged DNA can lead to cancer development, the researchers realized that understanding such mechanisms could be crucial for developing targeted cancer treatments.

“Our DNA is always under attack,” Technion doctoral student Feras Machour, who jointly led the research, tells NoCamels. “We were interested in researching how our cells cope with DNA damage.” 

This led to an exploration of how cells deal with DNA damage in order to improve targeted cancer therapies, because numerous forms of cancer have mutations in the proteins or genes that are responsible for maintaining and repairing DNA.

The team focused on the RBM10 protein because it is frequently found to be absent in patients with an aggressive type of lung cancer called lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD), Machour says. 

He explains that around 40 percent of all lung cancer patients are affected by this particular form of the disease, and mutations in RBM10, which also make tumors more resistant to current treatments, are found in up to 25 percent of LUAD cases. 

This means that a significant number of all lung cancer patients potentially have a mutation of the RBM10 protein. 

As such, the researchers set themselves the goal of developing new, personalized strategies to treat the specific type of LUAD that includes a loss of RBM10.

Machour says there has been little previous research into missing or mutated RBM10 in tumors, despite its frequent occurrence in LUAD. He hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that the absence of the protein makes it difficult to create a way to target it. 

This led the team to take what Machour calls “a slightly different approach” – looking for genetic signs specific to cells that are missing RBM10, and therefore more susceptible to cancerous growth, in order to remove them. 

Analyzing biological data led the team to dozens of “very high scoring” potential genetic identifiers, and they centered on one gene called WEE1 that is already the focus of clinical trials for a molecule that can interact with proteins.  

“Our idea was that, since it’s already in stage two clinical trials, maybe we can repurpose the drug for RBM10 deficiency in carcinoma, and then… people with mutations in RBM10 would have a therapeutic option that wasn’t available before,” Machour says.

The team then indeed showed that inhibiting the WEE1 gene is highly effective in eradicating RBM10-deficient lung cancer in mice. The findings were recently published in the Nature journal.

“We were very happy to see that the tumors that had RBM10 mutations were very sensitive to this inhibitor, and the tumor actually shrank significantly in size,” Machour says, “meaning that it might be a very reliable therapeutic option for lung adenocarcinoma patients.”

The potential treatment must now undergo clinical trials in humans, which Machour says requires as yet unsecured collaboration with a major research institute or pharmaceutical company. In all, he says, it could still take up to 15 years for the drug to be on the market.  

Machour himself is leaving the Technion for London, where he will continue his post-doctoral studies at the world-renowned Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research center that is partnered with Cancer Research UK. 

Even so, the Technion lab run by Prof. Nabieh Ayoub, who jointly led the research, will continue to work on the RMB10 protein. 

“And maybe find combinatorial approaches to make the treatment even more effective,” he says. 

The post Missing Protein Could Unlock Treatment For Aggressive Lung Cancer appeared first on NoCamels.

And the industry is extremely profitable, with a projected global revenue for 2024 of $20 billion – a sum that is expected to rise to $22 billion within five years. 

But while attitudes to medical cannabis have changed, the primary method of delivery – smoking – has remained the same. And for one Israeli startup, such an unhealthy practice to deliver medical treatment seems counterproductive, to say nothing of the growing stigma surrounding smoking. 

“We couldn’t see smoking as a solution,” IMCI Pharmaceuticals CEO Alon Hershkovitz tells NoCamels. “[So] we decided to look at the evolution of cannabis products.” 

What IMCI, which views itself as an R&D startup rather than a drug company, came up with was a way to create nanoparticles out of cannabis, which are then taken in one of three ways. 

And according to Hershkovitz, this means more effective delivery of the cannabinoids – the active ingredients in the cannabis plants – as the body absorbs them better when they are in nanoparticle form. 

“That allowed us to reduce the dose significantly in order to reach the same therapeutic benefit as the current solution,” he says.  

The company works with partners who grow the cannabis plants and who then extract the cannabinoids in the form of a concentrated resin-like substance that Hershkovitch compares to honey. IMCI then uses a proprietary method to turn that substance into nanoparticles.

IMCI’s iCann platform has three different products, each with different qualities: The fast-acting version comes in the form of a pill placed under the tongue, which takes 5 to 10 minutes to act and lasts for up to two and a half hours; the long-lasting version is a tablet that adheres to the inside of the mouth, and while it takes up to 45 minutes to take effect, the benefits can last for as long as eight hours; the final version is a pill that is swallowed, which takes around 20 minutes to take effect and lasts for up to four hours.  

The three different therapies are all designed for people suffering from chronic ailments and pain, and Hershkovitz says they all complement one another to provide treatment options for people suffering from a range of disorders, including pain, colitis, Alzheimer’s and autism. 

The long-lasting pill, for example, is suited for pain relief during the night. 

“They have a very good night’s sleep, and they’re waking up in the morning feeling much better,” Hershkovitz says, “because people with pain normally will wake up up to four times during the night because of it.” 

The different medications include varying proportions of both THC and CBD, the two main cannabinoids that cause a reaction within the human body. And although the company primarily uses THC as its analgesic, the intoxicating qualities that are sought after by recreational users of cannabis are seen as a side effect that IMCI counters by carefully controlling the dosage in each treatment.  

In fact, Hershkovitz explains, the company plans to provide the nanoparticles to pharmacies so that the pharmacist can create a “tailor-made solution” on the spot, according to the specific dosage prescribed by a physician. 

The Gan Yavne-based company was founded in 2018 after Hershkovitch’s business partner in a previous venture was diagnosed with stage four cancer of the stomach. Cannabis greatly helped him in the last six months of his life, Hershkovitch says, which inspired him to take the plant seriously as a therapeutic. 

His IMCI co-founder Avi Yakobovich had a similar experience with his own father in his final days, when cannabis greatly helped to ease his pain, and the two believed that they could have a positive effect on the lives of people who were suffering. 

“We knew that this is really helping people,” Hershkovitch recalls. “We decided to learn about it more, and we read every study, every article.” 

He highlights the massive amount of research on cannabis conducted in Israel, where THC was actually first isolated and identified in 1964 by Prof. Raphael Mechoulam of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who known as the godfather of cannabis research.  

Largely self-funded, IMCI began to develop its therapies – with some support from the government’s Israel Innovation Authority and an angel investor. The company also worked in association with the Hebrew University’s Yissum technology transfer company, as the initial development had come out of the university. 

IMCI is now looking for further investment, but Hershkovitz concedes that while he has great faith in Israeli innovations, the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza means that it is “a very difficult time.” 

The ingredients in IMCI’s products are already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), but the company is nonetheless planning human trials at the start of next year at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. 

The trials, Hershkovitz explains, are not formal tests as required for FDA approval, but rather to further observe the effects of the cannabinoids on the body. 

IMCI aims to have its first product ready for market within nine months to one year, and he predicts that the other products will follow shortly afterwards.  

Hershkovitz believes it is only a matter of time until the medical world stops recommending smoking as a method of delivery for cannabinoids, and IMCI’s nanoparticles are the solution. 

“This is something that we expect to see in the market,” he says.

The post No Smoking! Startup’s Tiny Answer To Safer Medical Cannabis appeared first on NoCamels.

For it is the mosquito that kills more people than any other creature in the world, the US Centers for Disease Control says, by passing on diseases such as malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever and Zika.

The energy humans expend fighting one another is “incomparable to the efforts we should put towards mosquito-borne diseases,” says Daniel Voignac, a researcher and PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has come up with a novel way to keep the insects away from our skin. 

Mosquitos – of which there are more than 3,700 varieties – can be found in almost every part of the planet, and as global temperatures rise due to climate change, the warm and wet areas in which they thrive are only expected to increase, and with them the occurrences of the diseases they carry. 

Safely and effectively preventing the insects from biting us remains a challenge. The most efficient repellents recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency, such as DEET (diethyltoluamide), contain chemicals that a report published by the US government’s National Center for Biotechnology Information called “a silent environmental chemical toxicant.” 

Voignac and his fellows at the Hebrew University have developed a cellulose-based gel that dries on the skin into what he calls “a really strong, transparent film,” which blocks mosquitoes from detecting the human scents that attract them to us. 

Cellulose is a naturally occurring sugar compound made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that is found in plants, including fruits, vegetables and wood. It is used in industry in paper, adhesives and even cosmetics, and, although it is not water-soluble, the molecules in the film created by Voignac and his colleagues can be dispersed by water. 

Voignac says the idea for the cellulose gel came during the coronavirus pandemic, when one of his two supervising professors at the Hebrew University, Yossi Paltiel, complained that he could not spend too long in his garden due to his susceptibility to mosquito bites. 

That led to a conversation between Paltiel and Voignac’s other supervising professor, Oded Shoseyov, about combining their extensive scientific know-how and exploring ways to deter mosquitoes.  

The group who came together to develop the cellulose gel – Paltiel, Shoseyov, Voignac, Prof. Jonathan Bohbot and PhD candidate Evyatar Sar-Shalom – were inspired by a rare study on the use of graphene, a newly discovered strong, transparent and conductive material made of a thin layer of carbon atom, as a potential mosquito repellent. 

But they decided that graphene was not a viable option, despite the fact that its tight atomic structure does actually block a person’s scent from leaving the body. 

“Mosquitoes would fly by and not detect anything,” Voignac tells NoCamels, calling graphene “chemical camouflage.” 

“It’s a nice theoretical concept,” he says, “[but] it’s not that much of a scalable concept, because graphene has unknown toxicity.”

Furthermore, he explains, when it is scaled up in order to cover the skin, graphene takes on a dark color, rendering it unusable. 

Instead, they turned to commonly used cellulose, whose properties Voignac was already exploring with relation to electrical engineering, as part of his PhD. 

“We were working in the lab with [this] really cool material that is very thin, transparent and derived from plants,” Voignac says. “So we had knowledge of how to use this material.”  

Tests of the cellulose gel – volunteers with it on their skin inserted a hand into a cage of mosquitoes – showed an 80 percent reduction in bites, which Voignac says was a “really nice” result. 

Perhaps more crucially, they found that using the cellulose gel led to a 99.4 percent reduction in the number of eggs produced by the female mosquitoes used in the test, as they need human blood to create their eggs. 

Only the female mosquitoes feed on humans to get the nutrients that are necessary to create the membranes of the eggs, Voignac explains. 

“This also meant that we could create maybe an effective solution to prevent proliferation of mosquitoes,” he says.

At that point, the team approached Yissum, the Hebrew University’s tech transfer company, and patented their discovery. They also published a paper about their research in PNAS Nexus, a publication from the US National Academy of Science.  

The paper made waves internationally, garnering coverage in dozens of news outlets worldwide and sparking the interest of what Voignac calls “industry leaders in mosquito repellents,” who were keen to learn more about the product.  These are not, he stresses, the pharmaceutical companies, but rather cosmetics firms who are responsible for developing insect repellents for humans. 

And because the US considers mosquito repellents to be pesticides, their impact on the human body is not regulated, he explains, and only their effect on the environment and the mosquitoes themselves must be evaluated. Furthermore, all of the components in the gel are established ingredients for cosmetics. 

For now, the team is processing the data from its first round of tests, conducting further tests and refining a prototype of the gel. 

If the prototype can be scaled up successfully and still work, then says Voignac they are “95 percent close to the final product.” 

Through its collaboration with Yissum, the team is in contact with a number of companies interested in the gel, and Voignac is aware of its potential to reduce not only mosquito eggs and bites, but the diseases the insects can pass on to humans. 

“We’re talking about malaria – it’s 1.16  deaths per minute,” he says. 

“So it’s also a race against time; there’s a bigger issue than just a university lab trying to make money with a cool invention. If we have real technology, we want to race towards deploying it as fast as possible to the people that want it.”  

The post Gel That Stops Mosquitoes Biting And Reproducing Is Creating A Buzz appeared first on NoCamels.

Joint replacements in particular have become increasingly common. In the US alone, close to 3 million hip and knee replacements are carried out every year, according to the American Joint Replacement Registry. 

While most of these procedures take place without further incident, around 2 percent of patients experience an infection at the implant site that cannot be treated with antibiotics. And although this is only a small proportion of the total number of patients, in real terms it affects thousands of people each year. 

The difficulty in treating these infections is due to a biofilm – a thin layer of cells that bacteria use to protect themselves against attack – that forms at the infection site and even on the implant itself. 

Until now, removing the biofilm in order to treat the infection has required more surgery, but Israeli medtech startup Dimoveo Medical has found a way of using iron nanoparticles to clean away the biofilm with a far shorter and less invasive procedure. 

“Once you get into that position where you have an infection which is untreatable with antibiotics, you go back into the operating room and you reopen the surgery,” Yair Ramot, founder and CEO of Dimoveo, tells NoCamels.  

After the surgical site has been reopened, the implant and the infected area in the body are rinsed with copious amounts of saline to clear the biofilm so that antibiotics can be administered. 

Unfortunately, Ramot says this procedure only works for about half of those suffering from infection at the implant site. 

“They are washing it with a lot of saline and a lot of prayers, because 50 percent of those patients come back again with another infection. It doesn’t go away,” he says.  

And if the infection does return, the steps to remove it become far more invasive, with another operation that involves taking the implant out altogether, and thoroughly cleaning and removing any trace of bacteria from it and the surgical site. 

The implant is only reinserted three months later, according to Ramot, and only if the site is still free of infection. 

Even with this drastic step, there is a 25 percent chance that the infection will return, he explains.  

“Then you go into chronic infection, meaning you have to take antibiotics for the rest of your life. It’s a really bad situation,” Ramot says. 

Dimoveo’s proprietary solution is to partially reopen the surgical site and fill the area with a saline solution containing the iron nanoparticles. The nanoparticles are then hit by ultrasound waves, sending them spinning around at high speeds to destroy the biofilm and enable the infection to be treated by antibiotics. 

“I would call it a sandblasting effect on a nanoscale,” says Ramot. In fact, the name Dimoveo derives from the Latin word for remove or extract. 

The entire process, which is carried out under anesthesia, takes less than an hour. Both it and the recovery period of several weeks are significantly shorter than for the options that were previously available, says Ramot. 

Having decided to move away from using increasingly aggressive medications in an effort to penetrate the biofilm, Dimoveo, which was founded in 2020, took the approach of removing the layer altogether using mechanical energy, washing it away and opening the door for antibiotics to be used effectively. 

The idea for the actual process to clean the biofilm came from a doctor of physics who built on the existing use of ultrasound by adding the nanoparticles. Iron was chosen for the nanoparticles as they had already been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, explains Ramot, himself an experienced entrepreneur in the medical device field and who has degrees in both biomedical and mechanical engineering. 

Dimoveo is for now focused on knee implants. But Ramot says that the procedure is suitable for any kind of joint replacement, such as knee, hip, ankle, shoulder and spine, as well as bone fractures that require screws or a plate to be inserted. 

“We decided to start with the knee, because this is the most common and the most easy [procedure] to prove our efficacy,” he says.  

Most of the funding for the development process came from the Israel Innovation Authority, the government department dedicated to advancing the national tech sector on the international stage, as well as the Israeli medtech incubator MEDX Xelerator, whose offices in the central city of Or Yehuda are also home to Dimoveo. 

“Working in MEDEX is very good,” Ramot says. “There’s a lot of support.”  

The startup is currently aiming to raise an additional $5.5 million to see it through its clinical studies, which it plans to complete at medical centers in Israel, Michigan and Helsinki. And Ramot admits that Israel’s ongoing war with Gaza, triggered by the massive October 7 terror attack by Hamas, has made fundraising a challenge.  

Dimoveo has already carried out non-human studies at a hospital in Pittsburgh to show that the nanoparticles can successfully clear the biofilm and that the method itself is completely safe for a patient who has already been through a painful surgical procedure. It also showed that orthopedic surgeons can incorporate the process into their current standards of care. 

Dimoveo is also preparing to submit a request for approval from the FDA, a vital step for marketing the device in the United States. 

That startup plans to commercialize the device in mid-2025, aiming to find a strategic partner in the form of a large, established company in the field in order to help penetrate the market. 

Once this has been achieved, Ramot explains that the next step will be to create a next generation product that could be incorporated into the initial joint replacement surgery to stop any infection taking hold at all.  

“We don’t do any harm to healthy tissue; we don’t do any harm to the implant itself,” Ramot says. “This is very important.” 

The post Nanoparticles ‘Sandblast’ Hard-To-Handle Bacteria From Joint Implants  appeared first on NoCamels.

Inspired by the hunch, Israeli biotech startup ODE Pharma was founded with the mission of developing safe and cost-effective treatments for children suffering from the genetic disease. 

CF is caused by a defective gene that makes the body produce thick and sticky mucus in the lungs and other organs, which leads to a variety of serious lifelong issues, including chronic respiratory problems and recurrent lung infections. 

There is no cure for the disease, and although a range of treatments have been developed to ease its symptoms, they can be expensive and are limited in scope. 

But ODE believes its new therapy can make a difference to young people suffering from the disease and other respiratory disorders, by healing lung cells that have been damaged. 

“We want people to go from uncomfortable to comfortable,” ODE Pharma CEO Assaf Bivas tells NoCamels.

The company focused on cystic fibrosis in children because they believed their molecule could have a real impact on a disease that had hitherto received little attention and was very costly for parents – both in terms of managing CF and the toll it took on the families. 

“Beyond focusing solely on profits”, Bivas says, “our mission is to bring happiness and health to individuals of all ages affected by respiratory and pulmonary conditions, such as cystic fibrosis.”

This is also the overall approach of the Pollen Innovation Group, the investment group backing ODE Pharma that was co-founded by Bivas, Asaf Ofer, Ofer Shapira, and Dave Wolf.

Asaf Ofer is also the CEO of Kenaf Ventures, a cleantech startup based in southern Israel that creates a versatile biomaterial from the easily cultivated Kenaf plant. 

ODE is utilizing its novel molecule ODE-001, to enhance cellular resilience against inflammation and other forms of deterioration.

The late Prof. Shmuel Ben-Sasson, upon discovering the molecule, partnered with the Pollen Innovation Group, joined by renowned chemist and Nobel laureate Prof. Aaron Ciechanover.

Ben-Sasson’s groundbreaking discovery of the naturally occurring molecule within papaya fruit revealed its potential to revitalize lung tissue function and enhance energy production. This innovative compound, subsequently named ODE-001, offered a promising avenue for symptomatic relief.

Ben-Sasson’s distinguished scientific credentials lent credibility to his intuition regarding the molecule’s therapeutic potential.

The Pollen Group swiftly acquired the intellectual property rights to the molecule, completing the IP transfer in just one month.  

Then they first tested the molecule in a lab, inserting it into the epithelial tissue (a thin protective layer covering all the surfaces of the body) of healthy cells found in both the lungs and the intestine.  

Bivas says the team was thrilled to learn that ODE-001 did indeed extend the life of the healthy cells by almost 50 percent. And when they moved to test inflamed cells, the team found that it was just as – if not more – effective.  

“We found that [the molecule] is a very, very strong anti-inflammatory agent that… rehabilitates the cell itself,” says Bivas. “We had something.”  

A clinical trial conducted in association with one of Israel’s four health care providers further yielded “very good and promising results,” he says. 

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, ODE conducted a clinical trial involving 13 patients in an Israeli intensive care unit.

“These patients received ODE-001. Remarkably, all 13 patients were discharged from the hospital within five days of treatment, significantly outperforming the control group of 59 patients who did not receive ODE-001,” Bivas says.

And while the control group experienced a 24 percent mortality rate, he adds, no patient in the ODE-001 group died.

Newly emerged from stealth, ODE Pharma has so far raised $1.5 million in funding and is in the process of raising another $5 million. 

It plans to start clinical trials for ODE-001 as a treatment for cystic fibrosis in children next year, with the aim of seeking orphan drug designation from the US Food and Drug Administration, a classification that applies to the development of novel treatments for rare diseases in the US.  

And with signs that ODE-001 helps mitigate damage from COVID and helps cells to fight inflammation, ODE has plans to release the molecule as a supplement for respiratory  issues in the next year. 

The company is working with Catalent, a multinational biotech manufacturer based in New Jersey with more than 50 factories, to mass produce the supplement. 

“With its exceptional safety, affordability, and potential for large-scale production, this compound is poised to make a significant impact,” Bivas says. 

The post Startup Sees Potential Of Papaya To Treat Cystic Fibrosis In Kids appeared first on NoCamels.

Parkinson’s is a progressive, neurological disorder that affects some 10 million people around the world. It hits both the nervous system and the areas of the body that are controlled by it, and its symptoms include tremors and motion difficulties.

Prof. Jeff Hausdorff, an expert in the fields of gait, aging and Parkinson’s disease who led the contest, described FOG as a debilitating and so far unexplained phenomenon that affects between 38-65 percent of Parkinson’s sufferers. 

Hausdorff is a member of the Department of Physical Therapy at TAU’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and runs the Center for the Study of Movement, Cognition and Mobility at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov). 

Each FOG episode can last between a few seconds to more than a minute, he said, during which the patient feels like their feet are “glued” to the floor, making it impossible for them to begin or continue to walk.  

The disorder has a major impact on a patient’s quality of life and can often lead to falls and even injuries. 

The contest asked researchers in machine learning from around the world to develop a model for a wearable sensor that can provide ongoing automated monitoring of these FOG episodes in the home. 

Hausdorff said that wearable sensors backed by machine learning would be able to monitor and quantify these episodes, allowing for an accurate, constant picture of a patient’s condition. 

This would also allow physicians to observe whether the disease had progressed or improved and its response to medication, he explained, potentially helping in the development of new therapies. 

Amit Salomon, a researcher at Sourasky who also worked on the project, explained that current diagnosis and tracking for FOG episodes relies on questionnaires filled in by the patients themselves, as well as observation by clinicians and in-depth analysis of video showing the patients walking. 

But while the latter is the reliable and accurate “gold standard,” she said, it is labor intensive and time consuming, and not practical for monitoring patients in their own homes. 

Around 25,000 entries were submitted to the contest, which had a $100,000 prize for the best solutions that was jointly provided by Kaggle, a Google company that conducts international machine learning competitions, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. 

Kaggle was used to host data from existing studies into FOG, involving more than 100 patients and approximately 5,000 episodes of the phenomenon, for use by the entrants. 

The winning solution involved a unique combination of machine learning methods, Hausdorff tells NoCamels, performing slightly better than the models that came in second and third place in the ability to accurately detect the FOG events. 

“An enhanced ability to objectively and automatically detect and quantify FOG events can inform treatment and help clinicians and patients better evaluate the effects of medications and other therapies on this symptom that profoundly impacts quality of life and independence,” he says. 

“Such a system could markedly improve the well-being of patients.”  

The detection abilities of the winning models were applied to data collected round the clock for one week, which revealed that there are specific times in a day when a patient is more likely to experience a FOG episode. 

This discovery, Hausdorff says, has implications not only for preparing a patient for such an event, in itself a stressful experience, but could also lead to improvements in therapy for these episodes. 

Just knowing what to expect can be helpful, for example in reducing stress and anxiety, according to Hausdorff.  

“This knowledge can also help with the fine-tuning adjustment of medications and other therapies and help patients to better deal with FOG,” he says. 

Hausdorff also has praise for the crowdsourcing nature of the contest, which he calls “a very positive experience” for both contest participants and researchers.  

“In a relatively short time, the contest made important and large advances to the field,” he says. 

“If other research and clinical questions and challenges can be addressed using contests and crowdsourcing, this type of an approach has a lot of merit. While it may not fit all problems, when it does, it should be considered.” 

The post Contest For Device To Monitor Parkinson’s Patients Yields Key Insight  appeared first on NoCamels.

But now a new study has found a way to combat both of these phenomena and restore these important cells to their optimal state. 

There are two forms of white blood cells (lymphocytes) in the immune system that attack and destroy cancerous cells, known as T (thymus) cells and NK (natural killer) cells. Some NK cells can be removed, genetically modified to make them more aggressive against cancer cells, and returned to the body to continue the fight. 

But both T cells and NK cells can experience dysfunction, struggling to overcome the cancer cells in the body. 

Scientists at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan have identified the root of this loss of performance in NK cells and developed a way to bring them back to full effectiveness – with help from nanoparticles.  

Prof. Mira Barda-Saad and her team at Bar-Ilan’s Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences determined for the first time that the poor performance by NK cells can have two causes. 

The first occurs if the “training” to fight cancer that developing NK cells undergo in the immune system is in some way disrupted, leading them to function incorrectly. This lack of a proper immune system response to cancerous cells or other foreign matter is known as anergy. 

The second cause is NK cells becoming exhausted by the constant stimulation they experience when they encounter a tumor in the body and begin to fight it. 

In the lab, Barda-Saad’s team found that both anergic and exhausted NK cells have a similar level of dysfunction when it comes to fighting cancer and identified two common factors: an enzyme called DGK alpha and a protein called EGR2.  

Such research into this phenomenon in NK cells has never been carried out before.  

“While significant progress has been made in understanding the molecular mechanisms of T cell dysfunction, the equivalent pathways remain relatively unexplored for NK cells,” the team wrote in an article about their work published recently in the EMBO Journal, an internationally respected publication focusing on molecular biology.

Incidentally, the fatigue in the fight against cancer has been seen in T cells and both kinds of NK cells, and the researchers found similarities between anergic and exhausted NK cells and poorly performing T cells.  

To revitalize the NK cells, the researchers focused on a nanoparticle delivery system to “silence” the enzyme and the protein that were having a negative impact on their performance. And when the two were muted, the researchers found that the NK cells could efficiently do their job of killing cancer cells without having to be removed from the body for treatment.  

“Our data suggest that ‘anergy’ and ‘exhaustion’ are not simply intrinsic non-responsive states,” the scientists wrote in the article, “but that these newly identified targets can potentially enable these dysfunctional NK cells to be reprogrammed in their native environment.”

Targeting the EGR2 protein in particular, they said, allowed exhausted NK cells “to effectively control tumor growth.” 

Similarly, they found that targeting the DGK enzyme had a profoundly positive impact on anergic NK cells, “restoring [them] to levels similar to the responsive ones.” 

As such, the scientists wrote, their studies involving both modeling and animals suggest that a nanoparticle-based delivery platform could “reprogram” the dysfunctional natural killer cells in their natural environment. 

And according to the team, the research could help in the development of highly effective immunotherapeutic treatments, whereby the immune system is encouraged to attack and kill cancer cells.     

“The modulation of NK cell responsiveness represents a promising approach in cancer therapy due to their innate ability to target cancer cells,” they said.

The post Rejuvenating ‘Cancer Killer’ Cells With Help From Nanoparticles  appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli startup Dermab.io is working on just that, aiming to create personalized biologic therapies (made, extracted or synthesized from biological sources) for people suffering from chronic and autoimmune diseases. 

The skin is not just a mechanical barrier, Dermab.io CTO and co-founder Meital Portugal tells NoCamels. 

There is in fact a “very strong connection” between the skin, the immune system and even other organs and tissue such as the gut, the brain and the central nervous system, she explains. 

“This is why skin biomarkers are [used for] disease management,” she says. 

As such, Portugal says, there are many diseases that can be observed by examining the skin, whether they are symptoms that are visible or not. And when they are not visible, a test of the skin biomarkers can reveal information about them. 

“Almost every internal pathology involves a skin manifestation,” Portugal says. “So if we collect the skin biomarkers, we can see some alteration in the levels or concentration that might indicate the disease.” 

Portugal says these biomarkers are a tool that can help model the severity of a disease or even predict it, and help manage any biologic treatment for it. 

For now, the company is focusing on autoimmune diseases, using their patented AI platform to help develop better treatments. 

The research is currently focused on psoriasis, which presents as a skin disorder in the form of patches of dry, scaly skin of varying sizes, but is actually an autoimmune disease – making it the ideal candidate. 

The study is being completed at three Israeli centers for psoriasis – Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem; Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov) in Tel Aviv; and Emek Medical Center in Afula. The company is also conducting a study on children suffering from atopic dermatitis at the Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva.

The main study has yielded very interesting preliminary results, Portugal says, showing that there are indeed several molecules detected in the skin through the non-invasive swabbing that can correlate to the efficacy of a biologic treatment for the disease. 

The AI-powered platform is currently 80 percent accurate in predicting how a patient will respond to a certain therapy, she explains, “which is great in the scientific aspect,” but that must rise to over 90 percent in order to be of real impact for the patient – and commercially viable.

However, she adds, integrating the biomarker results with other clinical data – such as age, comorbidities and previous treatment outcomes – can push that positive predictive value to where it needs to be.

And this is just the start of what the technology can potentially do, says Miriam Oron, Dermab.io’s CEO and co-founder. Like Portugal, Oron is experienced in the field of skin biomarkers.

“We’re only scratching the surface, and there’s much more work to be done in the future,” Oron tells NoCamels, explaining that the technology can be expanded into other crucial areas of medicine. 

“I believe we’ll be able to assist development of new drugs and also save time and cost of clinical studies,” she says, “because we’ll be able to screen in advance some of the molecules.”  

In fact, Oron says, it is with this in mind that the company is currently in discussion with a number of pharmaceutical companies who have expressed an interest in using the Dermab.io technology for their drug development processes. 

According to Oron, Dermab.io has one major competitor – a California-based company that uses microneedles to extract biomarkers from the skin, which is already commercial. But, she says, unlike the American company, the Israeli startup can be cost effective and make its platform accessible to all patients. 

Founded in 2022, the Haifa-based company is a portfolio company of the MindUP incubator for early-stage digital health startups. The incubator is also located in the northern city, and works in partnership with several industry heavyweights, including US tech firm IBM, which has a strong R&D presence in Israel, and Pitango, the largest VC fund in the country.  

Oron says Dermab.io’s support comes partially from the incubator and partially from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to advancing the nation’s famed high-tech industry. 

The startup was also part of the 2024 cohort for MassChallenge Israel’s Early Stage Accelerator Program, a four-month intensive course in Jerusalem that helps entrepreneurs advance their nascent companies. 

Furthermore, she says, the company enjoys support from a wide network of European colleagues, thanks to the projects both she and Portugal have previously worked on that were funded by the European Commission. 

They also have a team of advisors in the US, and plan to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration for their platform. In fact, the company is planning to begin clinical trials in the US in late 2025, with the aim of becoming commercial the following year.  

Both Oron and Portugal are also applying their research experience to a project called Femmune, which aims to increase understanding of how autoimmune diseases affect women. 

“We noticed that there are differences in the skin biomarkers between the two groups,” Portugal says, explaining that hormonal variations between the two sexes play a major role in how the diseases progress. 

But while these kinds of diseases primarily occur in females, Portugal explains, most of the clinical trials for treatments have been based on males – both in animal and human studies. 

“It is very obvious, but only when you are exposed to it,” she says.  

The post Simple Skin Swab Is Key To Precision Drugs For Autoimmune Disease appeared first on NoCamels.

Processed food is actually a blanket description for any foods that have been changed in some way during their preparation. This could be drying, preserving (which is what we usually think of when we hear the term) or even cooking itself. 

And while we imagine processed foods to be ones that have undergone a more drastic treatment like breakfast cereal, ready meals, canned meat or prepackaged bread and pastries, which have had preservatives added, it can actually also include frozen fruit and vegetables, cheese and even yogurt. 

Meanwhile, we need proteins to maintain our health, and the right consumption of them has a major impact on our wellbeing, and even affects responses such as appetite and fatigue.  

The discovery of their relationship came when researchers from the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa were examining the possible danger of ingesting amyloid proteins in our food. 

These amyloids are the clumps of proteins that form a plaque that accumulates in the brains of people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. 

This plaque forms in the spaces between the nerve cells, which disrupts cell function in memory, atrophying key areas of the brain and ultimately causing significant loss of its functionality. 

But the scientists found instead that adding these amyloids to processed food can actually promote gut health and mimic the effect of dietary fiber found in fruit and whole grain. 

In fact, they found that the bacteria in our gut prefer amyloids to other forms of protein that can disrupt the digestive process, causing effects such as fermentation in the intestines. 

Focusing their research on proteins found in eggs and dairy, the scientists say they came to the conclusion that adding amyloids to processed food can break them down more slowly in the upper digestive system, creating a more gradual and controlled absorption of proteins by the body. 

They also realized that these amyloid proteins can manage a low ratio between two key bacteria in the intestines, balancing them to maintain gut health and potentially reducing the likelihood of diseases such as diabetes and even cancer. 

And examining the research from a broader perspective, the scientists said, it demonstrates that careful food processing can have the potential to make us healthier. 

“Today, we know how to precisely control and formulate foods and to estimate through models developed in my lab, how different food components will be digested in the body of different consumers,” said Prof. Uri Lesmes, who led the research team. 

“Together with innovative research tools, this scientific approach will help us understand the fate of proteins and innovative food components in the bodies of different consumers and may even facilitate development of personalized dietary choices,” he said. 

Lesmes worked on the study with doctoral students Gil Refael and Alon Romano, along with Prof. Meytal Landau and doctoral student Yitzhaq Engelberg from the Technion’s Faculty of Biology, as well as Prof. Omry Koren from the Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.

And the study, Lesmes maintains, may even lead to the development of processed foods as a mechanism to improve our health. 

“I believe that this research opens up new avenues for understanding the potential of ‘smartly’ processed food to expand human nutrition sources and improve health,” he said. 

The post Pass The Pies! Study Shows Processed Food Can Be Healthy appeared first on NoCamels.

This pressure, also known as idiopathic intracranial hypertension,  is caused by a buildup of blood and cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, when it fails to move properly through the veins that act as a drainage system in the head. 

And while treatment for PTC has always been spotty, an Israeli startup has developed a device that can expand the veins in the brain, releasing the fluid and easing the pressure – and the symptoms. 

These symptoms are severe and potentially life altering, including eventual blindness, and it is not clear why some people suffer from the disease, although it is more commonly found in young women and people who are overweight.

Vflow co-founder and CMO Anat Horev, who is also head of the Interventional Neuroradiology Unit at Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva, says that PTC was recognized 50 years ago, but it is only in the past few years that the extent of the problem has become truly understood. 

“They have a narrowing in the draining veins of the brain,” Horev tells NoCamels. “Therefore there is a horrible feeling of pressure in the head, noise in the ears or pressure in the eyes that actually can limit eyesight.” 

And the condition, she says, is more common than previously believed.  

Imagine, Horev says, that about 50 percent of patients with excruciating unresponsive migraines have a narrowing in the veins and are not being treated accordingly. Instead, they are going from one physician to another, without any real answers and as a result are becoming a burden on the system.

“We’re talking about millions of patients,” she says. “They’re not functioning, they’re not studying, they’re not working.” 

According to Horev, excess weight does play a major part in exacerbating the symptoms of the disease, as it places a greater strain on the neck and chest.  And as more and more people are recognized as overweight, there is a fair chance that  issue will only become increasingly common. 

A study released in March by renowned medical journal The Lancet found that in 2022, more than one billion people worldwide were living with obesity, including 43 percent of adults. 

As such, Horev explains, improving the drainage capabilities in the brain would have a major impact on the health of millions of people. 

“A very large group of scientists and physicians believe that this is the next thing in improving the quality of life of patients,” she says. 

Flexible Solution 

The startup’s unique vascular stent, called Viva Stent, is placed in the vein in the brain, directly where it narrows.   

“It’s always in the same place [in the brain],” Horev states. “We are not sure why.”  

Once the stent is put in place, the patient’s quality of life improves almost at once, with the debilitating symptoms clearing up, she says, adding that many of those suffering from PTC have taken multiple different medications with no results.  

“I enjoy performing the procedure, which is low risk, with the patient waking up with immediate symptoms relief,” Horev says.

The entire procedure, from start to finish, takes about one hour. 

While there have been previous attempts to use a stent to expand the veins in order to increase the drainage, Horev explains this has always been problematic due to the rigidity of the equipment being used. 

There was no device designed specifically for this procedure, she says. Instead a “very short and stiff” off-label stent – developed to deal with a clogged carotid artery – was used. This stent, however, could not adequately contend with what Horev says is the “very sharp curve” on the journey to reach the brain. 

Vflow’s Viva Stent, however, is “20 percent less rigid” and with its catheter delivery mechanism flexible enough to navigate through this turn. What is more, Horev says, the stent itself is kept at the back of the catheter during its passage from the groin, where it enters, to the placement site in the vein inside the brain. 

She explains that this allows for even greater maneuverability during the procedure. Only when the catheter has navigated the sharp turn is the stent brought forwards and maneuvered into place. 

“When the stent is at the back, you can take any turn you like, even a full turn,” Horev says. “Only when we are ready and we crossed the turn is the right time to push [it] forward.” 

The stent can also be moved back and forth as it is maneuvered into place, making it even easier to ensure it reaches precisely the right spot, she adds. 

Horev founded Vflow in 2021 with its CEO Dr. Bilha Cahana, an experienced entrepreneur with several successful companies already under her belt. The pair have spent the past three years fine-tuning the stent and are now preparing for human trials in Israel. 

Once the trial has been completed in Israel, the company plans to conduct a further study in the United States, in order to obtain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

And while there are a few other companies working on a stent for the same purpose, Horev says none are yet on the market.

Furthermore, she says, besides, the stent designed with features specifically for this disease, Vlfow’s device offers a unique delivery system that allows for safe and swift trackability and deployment.

For the past three years, the company has had ongoing investment from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to promoting the national tech sector, as well as personal funding from Cahana. 

Various small companies working in the field of medical devices have also invested, but now Vflow is looking for a major investment to see the startup through to the end of the clinical trials. 

The company was also a recent finalist in a contest for startups held by Be’er Sheva innovation hub Synergy7 and the Merage Israel Foundation. The two institutions share a mission of promoting technology native to the Negev, and designed the competition to help promising local startups in the sectors of healthcare, cybersecurity and robotics.

And helping to reassure prospective patients is a video created by a filmmaker who has successfully undergone the procedure with Horev. 

“It’s very reassuring to see what you’re going into,” she says. 

“She did it because she says that it changed her life. She was miserable until then.” 

The post Supple Stent Aims To Help Sufferers Of Painful Brain Pressure appeared first on NoCamels.

But one side effect of targeted therapy – a prominent facial rash that resembles acne – has caused such an adverse impact that it is even deterring some patients from continuing their planned treatment regimen. 

And this is an issue that Israeli startup EMRIS Pharma has tackled with a new carefully formulated ointment that patients apply onto their skin. 

According to the American Cancer Society, a rash is the most common side effect of targeted therapies – its occurrence and severity is dependent on the type and the dose of the treatment. This rash, which resembles acne, usually appears on the face and in some cases other normally visible areas such as the neck, scalp and upper back.  

And while the rash subsides once the treatment has been completed, it is so traumatic for some patients that they stop venturing into public or either reduce the frequency of their treatment regime or halt it altogether. 

Dr. Sharon Merims, EMRIS CSO and co-founder, tells NoCamels that around 90 percent of patients receiving targeted therapies have some kind of skin toxicity. 

Merims is a dermatologist who heads the Dermato-Oncology and skin toxicity clinic at the Sharett Institute of Oncology at Hadassah University Hospital-Ein Kerem in Jerusalem. 

“The profile of the skin rash is very troublesome because it involves the face,” Merims says. 

“[Patients] have a very unique facial rash, which is a very big problem for the quality of life. You can understand, once it’s on your face, you can’t really have a normal day to day.” 

Merims began working on a solution eight years ago along with EMRIS co-founder and CTO Prof. Ofra Benny, a specialist in drug delivery systems at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The two mulled the possibilities of a topical solution to this issue – a cause of anguish for people already dealing with the implications of a cancer diagnosis. 

What they were contemplating, she explains, was a targeted therapy to manage the side effects of a targeted therapy.

“I started thinking about an idea,” she says. “What if we can produce a blocking agent that we would apply topically, only on the skin, that would block the cancer drug from connecting to the receptor only at the toxicity site.” 

During their research into the possibility of treating this rash locally, the two found the “potent lead molecule” that forms the basis of the EMRIS ointment that does – as Merims hoped – prevent the targeted therapy from affecting the skin cells. 

The targeted cancer therapy itself is based on a substance that is an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) inhibitor. This substance blocks the activity of the EGFR, which is related to cell growth and is found in many cells. By blocking EGFR, the treatment aims to prevent the cancer cells from growing, but also causes the skin side effect as the EGFR inhibitor attaches to EGFR on normal skin cells. 

The company itself was set up in 2023 along with its third co-founder, Dr. Lyora Aharonov, an expert in biological research with a wealth of experience in R&D management. Funding came from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to advancing the nation’s high-tech sector at home and on the international stage. 

The startup also received assistance from Yissum, the Hebrew University’s technology transfer company, which helped license EMRIS.

The EMRIS ointment, Aharonov tells NoCamels, blocks the EGFR inhibitor from binding to the skin cells and prevents the rash from developing, leaving the skin cells healthy and functioning normally.

“The key advantage of our treatment is its targeted action,” she says. “This is a real game changer for the patient.” 

What makes this drug so unique, Merims explains, is that it is the only solution for the rash that deals with the root of the problem – preventing it, rather than merely trying to mitigate the symptoms. 

“The accepted treatment today is avoiding the sun, putting on emollients and topical steroids with a regimen of antibiotics for two months” she says. 

“That’s the protocol every patient is getting around the world. That’s the treatment for skin toxicity.” 

Within the past year, Aharonov says, the company has very quickly reached  “significant milestones,” primarily the formulation of the topical ointment that can specifically reach the necessary layer of the skin. 

The formulated ointment has already undergone animal testing, with “very positive results for safety,” according to Aharonov. 

Human trials are due to begin at Hadassah in early 2026. After that, the startup also plans to hold clinical trials in the United States, a necessary step for receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. 

The  ointment is primarily designed for patients undergoing targeted therapy for advanced colon and  head and neck cancers. 

The priority, the company says, is keeping patients on their course of treatment for their cancer while improving the patients quality of life . 

“Most patients, when they have had enough of the rash – and it comes pretty early on in treatment – will skip a dose or two, or get 50 percent of the dose or stop treatment altogether,” says Merims. 

But the EMRIS solution, she says, “will help everybody on board these treatments.”  

The post Halting Unsightly Rash That Adds To Cancer Patients’ Burden appeared first on NoCamels.

Endometriosis is a chronic condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows outside of the uterus, primarily on the ovaries, bowel and other areas in the pelvic region, in what are known as lesions. 

And according to the World Health Organization, approximately 1 in 10 women of reproductive age suffer from it. 

EndoCure is developing an AI-powered robotic ultrasound system for comprehensive mapping of endometriosis lesions, leading to quicker diagnosis and customized treatment options. The system produces 3D imaging that is able to detect endometriosis lesions and other pathologies tinier than one millimeter in size that are extremely hard for current systems to detect.

Dr. Hadas Ziso, CEO and co-founder of EndoCure, tells NoCamels that today, medical professionals often perform surgery simply to find the lesions because no other way exists to accurately diagnose the condition.  

She explains that 80 percent of endometriosis lesions are too small to detect with any imaging modality and a sonographer can easily miss them. 

“The entire treatment detection process is like a vicious cycle and the patient is stuck within it,” Ziso says. 

In fact, so challenging is the detection of the disease, Yale Medicine reports that there is an average delay of four to 11 years between the onset of the symptoms of endometriosis and the diagnosis and treatment for it.  

Armed with four degrees, including an MSc in Biomedical Engineering and PhD in Medical Robotics from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Ziso originally set out to find an issue that she could help solve. 

“I really, really wanted to do something for women. I realized I don’t have the time to volunteer, so it has to be through my career,” she explains. 

Endometriosis was hardly on Ziso’s radar until she looked into unmet needs in women’s health. “As you probably know, there are many,” she says, with a wry laugh.

Ziso also initially thought that she had no personal connection to the disease, but once she started learning about the condition and speaking about it with other women, she realized that she knew several people who had struggled with it for years.  

She soon understood that endometriosis is a very complicated condition with few solutions currently available and that physicians were in dire need for better diagnosis and treatment options.  

And so in 2023, Ziso teamed up with her PhD advisor and business partner Prof. Moshe Shoham to found EndoCure, creating a tight-knit and enthusiastic team driven by the desire to bring good into the world. 

The EndoCure system integrates with standard ultrasound equipment, streaming the data using its own software as the robotic arm moves slowly and steadily around the area being scanned. The proprietary software can spot the miniscule lesions that could not previously be seen. 

Using the system, a patient can undergo a scan before surgery in order to identify where the lesions are. And, since endometriosis is a chronic condition and lesions can return even after surgery, EndoCure makes it easy to continuously monitor a patient. 

Ziso says that when it comes to treating endometriosis, there is no other solution that comes close to the one offered by EndoCure, and in fact, searching treatments for the disease will only bring up results showing just how dire the lack of options is.  

The most common area of research into endometriosis, she says, is the push for biomarker-based detection, such as saliva, blood and urine tests – much like the current COVID tests. These tests use biomarkers in the body to diagnose whether a woman is positive or negative for endometriosis. 

But, Ziso points out, these companies only provide the first step of a patient’s journey, because even with a diagnosis, endometriosis is a chronic condition that does not disappear. 

And rather than viewing them as competition, Ziso sees biomarker tests as a complementary tool for making EndoCure the most effective it can be. Once the test has indicated that a patient has endometriosis, EndoCure can find the lesions and be used to create a treatment plan. 

In the future, the system will also be able to help with detection of other conditions that leave physical wounds on the sufferer, such as chronic colitis and kidney stones.  

“No matter the discipline, if they do an ultrasound, they have the same problem,” Ziso explains.  

To date, EndoCure has raised $1 million, with funders including the Israel Innovation Authority, the government body devoted to promoting the national high-tech sector, as well as Haifa-based incubator program IN-VENTech, and veteran Israeli venture capital fund Teuza. 

EndoCure was also part of the 2024 cohort of MassChallenge Israel’s Early Stage Accelerator, and went through the program at the same time as they were conducting their first round of fundraising.  

Although not endometriosis is not a life-threatening condition, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognizes the need for a better solution for the women suffering from the disease. Therefore EndoCure qualified for the FDA’s FastTrack approval process, which is designed for treatments for serious conditions that fulfill an unmet medical need. 

EndoCure is beginning its next round of funding, which will take them through the completion of their first human clinical trials. They aim to become commercial in two and half years.  

Ziso says she and her team have spoken to more than 30 physicians worldwide, including in the US and Europe, who specialize in endometriosis and who are eager to use EndoCure’s system. The company has actually received several letters of intent from medical facilities indicating the desire to buy the EndoCure system once it is ready.  

“They don’t have any other solution,” she says.  

The post FemTech Firm Uses AI To Treat Painful, Incurable Endometriosis  appeared first on NoCamels.

People with both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are at very high risk of developing diabetic retinopathy, which is caused by damage to the blood vessels in the retina – the tissue at the back of the eye that captures light and translates it into sight – and can lead to blindness. 

In fact, the World Health Organization, the UK’s National Health Service and the US Department of Health all agree that diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness in the developed world.  

The only previous way to monitor diabetics’ retinal damage was with a regular check that involves dilating the pupil in order to flood the eye with light. And while a relatively short-lived experience, it is uncomfortable and incapacitating. Furthermore, it must be carried out in a clinical setting by a specialist eye doctor, adding to a long list of regular checkups that people suffering from the disease must carry out in addition to constantly monitoring their blood sugar levels. 

But AEYE Health, a startup with headquarters in Tel Aviv and New York, developed an artificial intelligence-based method to test for diabetic retinopathy by a family doctor, at a pharmacy or even in a patient’s own home, with immediate results.  

“The huge advantage in this exam is that it’s done in a fully non-invasive way, on the spot, no need to delay the patient,” AEYE Health CEO and co-founder Zack Dvey-Aharon tells NoCamels. 

AEYE Health’s proprietary technology, currently only available in the United States, is AI-driven software that analyzes an image of the eye taken with a simple store-bought camera approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, and without having to dilate the pupil. 

“We do not deal with hardware in any way,” Dvey-Aharon says. “The cameras are off the shelf, approved by the FDA [as is] our AI solution to do an autonomous interpretation of those images acquired by those cameras.”  

In fact, the technology has received two separate authorizations from the FDA – initially for analyzing images captured by a tabletop camera and more recently for analyzing images taken by a mobile camera.  

And because it is a small device, Dvey-Aharon points out that it is can be easily moved from one examination room to another, and then stored on a shelf or in a drawer.  

This ease of access and testing is key to helping people actually keep eye doctor appointments, he explains. For while the annual check is crucial to preventing blindness in diabetics, the discomfort and inconvenience actually deter significant numbers from attending. This phenomenon of failing to attend necessary medical appointments is known as the “care gap.”  

And, says Dvey-Aharon, the care gap when it comes to annual diabetic eye exams is considered one of the most important, because of how significant it is and how many people fall into it. 

“All diabetic patients really need to do this exam on an annual basis,” he says. 

“Unfortunately, most don’t actually follow through. They are aware they need to do it – they go to the person that treats their diabetes and they’re told to go and see the eye doctor. And they don’t go.” 

According to Dvey-Aharon, AEYE Health is the only company offering such a “clear solution” in the US, particularly now it has received FDA approval for mobile camera analysis. 

Furthermore, he says, it is almost unheard of for the FDA to approve an AI diagnosis that is fully autonomous instead of being used as an accessory. 

“Typically, the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare ends up as some sort of a decision support solution for physicians, some sort of measurement of something that physicians afterwards can use to determine,” he says.  

“This is the only area where the FDA actually allows the AI to do the screening.”  

The FDA approval came based on data in three clinical studies, which meant, Dvey-Aharon recalls, AEYE Health clearing “a super high bar.”  

He explains that building the machine learning AI technology used in the platform was a lengthy undertaking that involved collecting and analyzing massive amounts of data in order to understand how to differentiate between patients whose eyes needed no immediate further care and those who required a referral to an ophthalmologist. 

“There is no kind of a secret sauce, one element that is behind that, but actually a long, arduous process,” he says. 

“If you want to really do things differently, there is a lot of innovation that needs to take place. And this innovation is in the end based on revelations, and the revelations are done during research processes.” 

Founded in 2018 by Dvey-Aharon and COO Danny Margalit, the startup received vital funding from the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, which encourages cooperation between US and Israeli tech companies. 

Tal Kelem, BIRD’s Israel-based Director of Business Development, tells NoCamels that the fact that the foundation ended up investing more than planned in the startup indicates how important the organization believed the technology to be. 

Dvey-Aharon in turn praises BIRD for creating a partnership between the startup and UMass Memorial Health, the largest health care system in Central Massachusetts, and along with it a collaboration with UMass Chan Medical School.  

The FDA approval for the portable analysis platform has opened up new doors for the startup, which Dvey-Aharon says is about to announce a new collaboration with an American company that carries out millions visits to patients’ homes each year, in order to carry out blood tests or other forms of medical checks. 

“Now, they will embrace this technology,” he says.  “This is something you can actually do in the context of home health.”

The post AI Makes Vital Diabetic Eye Test As Simple As Saying ‘Cheese’ appeared first on NoCamels.

In the meantime, as the results may take days to come in, the doctor recommends that the patient get started on a round of antibiotics, making an educated guess to diagnose a possible bacterial infection and hoping to tackle it before it gets worse. 

The doctor makes the best recommendation with the knowledge available at that moment.  

Unfortunately, inefficient testing has led to the over-prescription of antibiotics, resulting in antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which is when bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.   

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 1.27 million deaths every year that are directly attributed to antimicrobial resistance, with the prediction that by 2050, AMR will be the cause of 10 million annual deaths worldwide.  

To tackle this issue, Israeli medical technology startup NanoSynex has developed a rapid personalized diagnostic test, which will enable doctors to prescribe the correct antibiotics at the moment they are needed most.  

“There is a clear issue of misuse and overuse of antibiotics, and one of the ways to address this crisis, other than developing new antibiotics, is to better use existing antibiotics, by boosting the development of rapid and reliable diagnostic solutions, which is what we are doing at NanoSynex,” Diane Abensur, CEO and co-founder of NanoSynex, tells NoCamels. 

NanoSynex offers laboratories better and faster solutions to determine the best treatment plan by providing rapid and accurate results for Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST), tests that are used to determine which specific antibiotics a particular bacteria or fungus is sensitive to. 

By prescribing the most appropriate antibiotic treatment to patients in order to treat them earlier, and also to prevent antimicrobial resistance from spreading in the environment, they are working to prevent the growth of the superbug crisis that is threatening the world today. 

“Our company is developing a revolutionary solution for providing fast and accurate results,” Abensur explains. 

The company, which is located in Ness Ziona’s Weizmann Science Park, has designed a disposable test card that is pre-loaded with a large panel of antibiotics at a variety of concentrations. 

A sample containing the bacteria causing the ailment is taken from the patient and injected into the almost 2,000 nanowells of the test card and then incubated in a benchtop reader that NanoSynex has developed. Once they are incubated in the reader, the bacteria present in the patient’s sample metabolize and grow, emitting a fluorescent signal. 

NanoSynex uses a specific fluorescent marker that correlates the intensity of a fluorescent signal to the amount of bacterial growth.  Its proprietary software then captures images of the test cards and issues a list of antibiotics that are appropriate for the patient, as well as the minimum concentration of each antibiotic that would be needed to kill the bacteria. 

NanoSynex’s core technology was developed by Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, who at the time of development was serving as Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Faculty at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.  

Now the Chief Scientific Advisor of NanoSynex, Levenberg performed a scientific transfer of the technology to NanoSynex in 2018, and the company was founded that year by Abensur and NanoSynex COO Michelle Heymann. 

Since its founding, NanoSynex has raised almost $11 million, having received funding from sources all around the world, including from angel investors, grants, the Israel Innovation Authority and the European Innovation Council.

NanoSynex has had to become especially resilient following the mass terror attack of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent – and still ongoing – war with Hamas, the terror group that perpetrated it.  

The company has continued to operate while dealing with the shock and trauma of the war and losses as well as the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel that have impacted their ability to reach their office.  

The company has cross-trained employees in critical roles to mitigate the impact of sudden call ups for Israel Defense Forces reserve duty, and departures abroad, to ensure essential tasks can still be carried out.  

In spite of these obstacles, NanoSynex now possesses what is called a minimum viable product, and the next step for their team is to now demonstrate their product in a clinical setting. 

While there are other testing technologies available, NanoSynex says its two major advantages lay in their product’s ability to help doctors determine in a rapid and automated way both the correct antibiotic as well as the minimum concentration required of that antibiotic to inhibit growth of the bacteria. 

“Our goal is to reduce mortality and morbidity rates by fighting superbugs with rapid and precise diagnostics testing and avoid going back to the pre-antibiotic era, since developing new antibiotics takes too long and bacteria develops resistance to new antibiotics at a much faster rate than the new antibiotic can be developed,” Heymann explains.  

The ability to test up to 20 patients at once and the quantity of antibiotics that they can test for at an affordable cost sets NanoSynex apart from the many startups that are focused on more expensive niche testing.  

When it comes to the companies that have offered testing for years and continue to dominate the market, NanoSynex explains that it is their ability to process large amounts of information in a short amount of time that gives their product a great advantage.  

The team is eager to participate in clinical studies in microbiology departments of hospitals which will ultimately bring them closer to their goal of saving lives by fighting and preventing antibiotic resistant bacteria.  

The post Startup Fights Superbugs, Antibiotic Resistance With Rapid Testing   appeared first on NoCamels.

The carotid arteries – twin blood vessels on either side of the neck that carry blood to the face, head and brain – can become clogged by a fatty deposit known as plaque, which is caused by an unhealthy lifestyle. 

This phenomenon is known as  carotid artery stenosis. And, according to the Cleveland Clinic, one of the best ranked medical centers in the US, up to 5% of the general population could suffer from it. 

This plaque is dangerous because it narrows the arteries, thereby reducing the blood flow to the head. Furthermore, pieces of this plaque or blood clots can break off and travel to the brain. In both cases, the patient is at risk of a stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) also known as a mini-stroke. 

The most common treatments for a blocked carotid artery are either an incision into the blood vessel that is then used to remove the plaque or the insertion of a stent that widens the blood vessel. 

Neither of these options is ideal for different reasons, says Or Zigelboim, the CEO of Pylon Medical, the startup that has developed the new surgical treatment of carotid artery stenosis. 

Making an incision in the carotid in order to remove the plaque is “a very invasive procedure with a long hospitalization and high risk for infection,” Zigelboim tells NoCamels. 

Placing a stent via the femoral artery in the groin also has its drawbacks, despite being minimally invasive, he says, as the stent must travel through more than half the length of the body to reach the carotid artery. 

“It’s very difficult for the physician to come all the way from the femoral artery, traveling this torturous way and then navigating up to the carotid,” Zigelboim says. 

“It can take a lot of time and a lot of effort and sometimes not succeed.” 

And throughout both procedures, he says, the patient is at risk. 

Pylon’s solution, he explains, is one that resolves the biggest issue with an invasive surgical procedure, namely how to close the incision into the carotid once the plaque has been cleared. 

“The main issue with the carotid is not how you get in, because getting in is easy,” Zigelboim says. “Once you are done with the procedure, you need a way to close the puncture into the artery so that it won’t bleed.” 

The startup’s solution is a device that allows the physician to automatically suture the hole in the carotid, which Zigelboim says involves navigating a blood vessel that is a mere 2 millimeters in diameter. 

The device itself resembles a small block with a handle to turn on one side and a foot not dissimilar to that found on a sewing machine to make the stitch.  In fact, Zigelboim compares the device to a sewing machine. 

The device brings the two sides of the hole together with a knot, allowing it to heal in the same way as stitches used to close a wound for other areas of the body. 

“We are creating a closure device dedicated to the carotid artery,” he says. “The physician doesn’t have to put their hands into the carotid or suture it or do anything else.” 

The entire process of closing the hole, he says, should take around 10 seconds with the Pylon device. 

The company was formed in 2023 as part of the MEDX Xelerator, an investor and incubator based in the central Israeli city of Or Yehuda that focuses on innovations in medical devices.

Zigelboim, a veteran of the medical device sector, first approached MEDX several years ago with a different project. And although that project never got off the ground, he says, MEDX CTO Gal Atarot later approached him to create Pylon in an answer to an unmet need. 

So far, the company has raised $1.2 million from investors, among them the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to advancing the national high-tech sector that also oversees MEDX. 

Zigelboim says the company has successfully completed trials of the device in animals and plans to begin human trials next year with an eye to marketing it in 2026. 

The company is actually planning to produce an entire medical kit for procedures involving the carotid artery, with the “main” item being the closure device. 

“But we also supply all the other things that the physician needs,” Zigelboim says. “Because when you’re dealing with the carotid… you just need something small, nice.” 

The post ‘Sewing Machine’ Sutures Simplify Complex Carotid Procedure appeared first on NoCamels.

Medication comes with two dates – one after which it cannot be used at all and one that gives a certain period to use the drug from the moment it is opened, usually several months. And it is that second date, which is often difficult to remember, that the Innocap smart cap records. 

“We found a problem regarding medication and expiration from the opening date,” Innocap co-founder Liron Sharony tells NoCamels. 

He explains that while the expiration date applies primarily to liquid medicines, it is also applied to many other health-related products, including vitamins and nutritional supplements and even baby formula and mouthwash, all of which are planned for future inclusion by Innocap. 

“These dates actually are approved by the health authorities and it is very critical to avoid the products beyond their expiration date,” Sharony says.

After that, he says, not only does the effectiveness of the medication decline, it can also pose a health risk.   

Innocap’s patent-protected cap is already fitted to the bottle when it is handed over to the user, and looks the same as a regular cap, save for two small dials on the top that represent the day and month of opening. 

The user adjusts the numbers on each dial to mark the date on which the product was opened, allowing them to know exactly when to discard it.

When the right date has been chosen, a button on the cap fixes the dials in place, so that it cannot change.

As well as the dial, the cap also comes with technology to allow it to connect to the user’s smartphone, without the need to download an app. 

And because there is no app involved, the digital side is accessed by a web browser. When the user taps their phone on the cap, it opens up a virtual leaflet for the product, resembling the information inside physical packaging. 

The virtual leaflet includes all the information about the product as well as the option to set a daily reminder to take it (primarily easily forgotten vitamins and supplements) and a dosage calculator based on the weight of the consumer, which the company says is of great help when administering medication to a child. 

The cap also facilitates repurchase of certain products by providing a link to the manufacturer’s website.  

Sharony created Innocap with co-founder and CEO Yves Sibony in 2020, determined to end the potentially detrimental guesswork involved for many people using medication with a defined shelf life. They spent three years developing the cap.

“People don’t write down when they opened a product,” Sibony tells NoCamels. “And if they don’t write the date of the opening, they can never know if it’s past its expiration or not.” 

This is true, he explains, for baby formula, vitamins, food supplements and drugs, and is very common indeed. 

“We are all in the same situation – we have a lot of products and we don’t know when we opened them,” he says. 

He says that although many drug companies write a warning on their packaging, telling consumers to make a note of when they opened the medication, Innocap research shows that less than one third actually follow this direction.  

“They forget – they don’t make a note on their phones, they don’t write it on the packaging,” he says. “Only 30 percent said that they do it. That’s nothing!” 

And all of the data regarding a person’s healthcare is completely anonymous, Sharony stresses, with users only identified by a random number in order to maintain regulatory medical privacy.  

Sharony compares the cap to the child-proof covers that were created by a Canadian physician in 1967 and soon after made compulsory in many parts of the world.  

“This product allows parents to give their children fresh medications,” he says.  

Sharony and Sibony created the cap after both separately having been faced with trying to work out whether medication for their sick children was still usable or had passed its expiration date. 

“We both found ourselves with kids with a fever in the middle of the night, and we reached for medication to give them and saw that it was already open,” Sharony says. 

“We hesitated – is it expired or not? And because I didn’t have a way to know, in the middle of the night I found myself driving to try to locate a pharmacy to buy my kids medication.”  

In fact, Sharony says, his own child even once had a bad reaction to out of date medication that resulted in a dash to the emergency room. 

Funding for the Herzliya-based startup came from what Sharony describes as “private angels and one small VC from Israel,” raising $1.2 million in three years. 

And Innocap has also just launched commercially, working with Israeli pharmaceutical company CTS on a very limited range of products that from last month come fitted with the smart cap. 

The partnership is for five years and, Sibony says, involves production of “many millions” of caps as the number of items fitted with them increases. 

Innocap is also in talks with another three Israeli pharmaceutical companies to manufacture caps for their products, and Sharony is confident that they have the infrastructure in place to easily scale up to meet the anticipated massive demand. 

The pair say that other smart caps have been produced to deal with this issue, but they were designed for sale directly to the consumer and not via the pharmaceutical companies themselves.  

Innocap, they say, is the only one in the world that has been developed as an integral part of the medication production itself, and their patent is a global one. 

“We are providing a platform,” says Sibony, “that gives you tools and features to manage your needs in a smart way.”

The post Smart Cap Keeps On Top Of Your Medication’s Crucial Expiration Date  appeared first on NoCamels.

This is especially the case with polypharmacy (when patients take five or more drugs at the same time), says Liat Primor, veteran of the pharmaceutical industry and CEO and co-founder of FeelBetter, a startup dedicated to improving outcomes for patients taking multiple medications. 

“Sometimes patients have not only one condition, they have plenty – 10 or 15 – and they take so many medications,” Primor tells NoCamels.

“They call them the yellow pills, the blue pills, the purple pills,” she says. “They don’t even know that they have a ‘bad pill’.”

Primor describes a scenario in which a medication causes an unwelcome side effect such as insomnia, which leads a patient’s doctor to prescribe another drug to treat that, which then causes constipation, which again requires another regular course of treatment and so on. 

“Instead of changing the first medication, now they have a second medication and a third,” she says. 

The situation is exacerbated when a patient sees multiple doctors for multiple conditions, with each physician treating a particular disorder rather than taking a holistic look at a patient’s treatments.

Primor says that 30 percent of elderly people who require hospital treatment do so because of polypharmacy treatments. And the elderly, she explains, make up most of the patients who take multiple medications. 

“If you would like [a way] to make sure that a patient is getting better with a combination of medications, it does not exist,” she says.   

In fact, a comprehensive, multinational study in 2023 found that 37 percent of the global population are taking five or more medications concurrently, a percentage that rises to 59 percent among those with frail health. The study also warned that clinicians need to take heed of the impact of different medications taken together. 

Understanding this need, FeelBetter uses a proprietary AI-powered platform identify patients who will deteriorate due to polypharmacy issues, aiming to help patients respond better to their drug regimen, and, ultimately, stay out of hospital and in their own homes.

When a patient’s data is complex, it is hard for a physician to gain a full picture in the 10 or 15 minutes usually allotted for each person they see, Primor says.  

“If someone would actually review their medication and see what happened to them, they could stay safe in their community,” she adds.  

Having been placed on her own polypharmacy regimen due to a complicated pregnancy, Primor says that developing the platform became “a quest.” 

She wanted to find a way for technology to help physicians and, perhaps more crucially, clinical pharmacists to identify the patients who were in need of this kind of medical attention before they arrived at the ER or were otherwise hospitalized. 

Primor left her long-term senior position at Teva, the Israeli multinational pharmaceutical company, to create on FeelBetter’s platform in 2018, alongside a team of clinician and high-tech experts, and with the support of investors including Shoni Health Ventures, Firstime Ventures, and Random Forest VC. 

She teamed up with Feelbetter co-founder and COO Yoram Hordan, the former COO of Israeli telecommunications giant Comverse (today known as Xura), who brought the AI and machine learning know-how to the development process. 

“We started this journey together, knowing that our dream eventually was to have those Teva and Comverse [skills] in the health domain that we are creating,” she says. 

According to Primor, while there are other companies working to reduce ADRs for polypharmacy patients, FeelBetter is the only one both working directly with healthcare providers and examining electronic medical records (EMRs) to uncover potential triggers. 

Developing the platform in Israel was more straightforward than in other countries, Primor explains, as Israel has used EMRs for around 20 years. On the other hand, the US, for example, has only had this system in place for the past two or three years. 

Furthermore, because Israel has just four health maintenance organizations, patients tend to remain in the same HMO, unlike in the US where a person’s healthcare provider can change regularly, for multiple reasons. 

“Israel is a huge advantage for every AI company that needs to have deep data on patients,” she says. 

Primor explains that the team started with the concept of identifying adverse drug reactions before they became serious and needed urgent medical attention.  

Working with Leumit Healthcare Services, one of the four Israeli HMOs, they examine the current and past medical records of 170,000 anonymous polypharmacy patients to look for signs of deterioration due the combination of drugs that they are taking. When these signs are identified, FeelBetter informs the HMO and it then informs the patients, allowing preventative steps to be taken. 

The company has just completed a study with Mass General Brigham, one of the largest medical centers in Boston and the leading US institution for hospital-based research. FeelBetter has offices in Boston, where Primor is based, as well as in Herzliya.   

Mass General Brigham validated FeelBetter’s algorithm, Primor says, and even calculated that the platform could save healthcare facilities up to $2,500 per patient by avoiding hospitalization, which would also be down by 24 percent. A peer-reviewed report on the platform is also due to be published next month. 

FeelBetter is also expanding its reach, and has just signed an agreement with Atlantic Health System, one of the biggest healthcare providers in New Jersey, with more than 400 locations.  Atlantic provides care for more than half of the state as well as parts of New York and Pennsylvania, and FeelBetter’s platform will be available for more than 520,000 beneficiaries via the company’s Accountable Care Organizations.

It has also integrated into one of the largest senior care facilities in the United States, where the American Health Care Association says there are some 30,000 assisted living communities with more than 1 million licensed beds. 

Taking a lot of medication requires responsibility, Primor says, on the part of the people and organizations who are trained to prescribe them, to ensure that the regimen is the best possible one for the patient. 

“As we all live longer,” she says, “it will become, for each one of us, our responsibility to ask for that.” 

The post Patient Care Platform Makes Taking Multiple Medications Safer appeared first on NoCamels.

Probiotics are live microorganisms such as bacteria and yeast that are naturally found in dairy products such as yogurt and cheese and fermented foods like pickles and kimchi, and can also be taken as a food supplement. 

Millions of people around the world take probiotics as part of their health regimen. In fact, global market research firm Statista says the probiotics market was worth more than $58 billion worldwide in 2022, and is expected to reach more than $85 billion dollars by 2027.

And now Karmiel-based startup Wonder Veggies has come up with a unique way of making it even easier to consume these friendly bacteria – by putting them inside the fruit and vegetables that we consume every day. 

The development of the technology involved is down to three people –  CSO Prof. Oded Shoseyov, Director of Probiotics Prof. Betty Schwartz and Director of Technology Dr. Lilach Iasur-Kruh – Wonder Veggies CEO Danny Weiss tells NoCamels. 

With a grant from Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture, the three worked for four years to find a way to “marry” probiotics with fresh fruit and vegetables, which had until that point been impossible. The trio of scientists co-founded the company proper in early 2022, along with Weiss and Gadi Lesin, the former CEO of Israeli food giant Strauss Group. 

The fruit and vegetables are infused with the probiotics through what Weiss calls a “simple spraying technique” applied during the growing stage, using a special liquid formulation devised by the company.

Alternatively, the same formula can be applied after harvest to pre-packaged produce such as leafy greens and salads. 

Weiss says that Wonder Veggie fruit and vegetables are the best way to consume probiotics, with the highest bioavailability – the rate at which an active ingredient is absorbed into the body. 

This, he says, is because Wonder Veggie’s proprietary method cultivates the probiotics within the tissue of the produce itself, something that offers a layer of protection from the acid in our stomachs that we use to digest our food. 

And crucially, Weiss adds, neither dairy nor fermented foods can sufficiently protect the probiotics from the stomach acid that will dissolve them. 

“Our own technology is enabling the probiotics to penetrate, propagate and survive inside the tissue of the fresh products, and the tissue provides a great protection against the acidity of the stomach, so we lose much less and more gets to our gut,” he explains. 

And durability aside, Weiss says that getting your daily dose of probiotics through fruit and vegetables also removes other difficulties posed by dairy products, fermented foods and supplements. 

According to Weiss, dairy foods exclude more than one third of people due to lactose intolerance or veganism; taking supplements is also a challenge for up to 30 percent of the population, without taking into account their cost; and fermented foods are an acquired taste that does not appeal to everyone. 

“If you’re consuming your dairy products/fermented foods/food supplements and you like them, that’s fine,” he says. 

“[But] fresh produce provides the ultimate delivery system with better bioavailability compared to all current consumption opportunities… no consumption-based limitation, best delivery system, highest bioavailability.”

The company is part of Yissum, the tech transfer company at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where both Shoseyov and Schwartz work, while Iasur-Kruh lectures at Braude College of Engineering in northern Israel. 

As a nascent startup, Wonder Veggies received an investment of $3 million from Jerusalem Venture Partners, one of the largest venture capital companies in Israel and owned by seasoned entrepreneur Erel Margalit. 

Weiss says the company is currently planning a new round of funding in the near future, aiming to scale up the technology in order to go commercial in 2025. 

The first international market they target will be the US, he says, but before that will come a smaller launch in Israel. 

“First of all, we’re Zionist – we like to do things here,” Weiss says, adding that while Israel is a small market, it is an excellent testbed where the company can work with local growers in order to further develop its technology.  

In the US, the company has already been in talks with a number of retailers, with several expressing what Weiss says is huge interest in the probiotic-infused produce. 

After launching the American market, the company plans a staggered expansion into Europe and Asia. 

“[Food retailers] are looking for two things: better health for the consumers, because this is their charter, and innovation,” Weiss explains. “Right now, they’re seeing something which is ticking all the boxes.”  

The post Probiotic-Infused Vegetables Will Give Your Gut A Boost appeared first on NoCamels.

“Eggs are a natural wonder, for meals, snacks, appetizers, whatever,” he goes on to claim, backed by upbeat music. The advert ends with a tagline well known to Americans: “The incredible edible egg.” 

“The egg is really a miracle ingredient in terms of its versatility and what it brings to our food,” Jon Rathauser, CEO (chief egg officer) and co-founder of Israeli startup Eggmented Reality, tells NoCamels. 

And Rathauser and the team at Eggmented Reality believe that they have created an even more incredible kind of egg, without any of the drawbacks associated with the industry. 

The real egg has struggled to remain as economical as it once was, with outbreaks of Avian Flu and salmonella triggering shortages and price fluctuations. And according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, there has been a slow but steady decline in the global production of eggs in recent years.  

Eggmented Reality identified a naturally occurring protein that can provide the same functionality as an egg in cooking — gelling, binding and foaming — but without the ongoing challenges of the egg industry.  

Through precision fermentation, a process in which microorganisms are used to produce specific functional ingredients, Eggmented Reality used this protein to create its better egg – no hen required. 

“We had this ability to conduct a search, and our search found a better egg,” Rathauser explains.  

The new egg is vegan, has no genetic modifications and places far less strain on the environment than traditional chicken and egg farming.  

Rathauser actually has the egg to thank for helping his family set down roots in the United States. His great-grandparents, who immigrated to New Jersey from Germany shortly before World War II, found a new life as chicken farmers, helped by their daughter Marriane – Rathauser’s grandmother. 

The family would deliver eggs in the area, and Grandma Marriane’s route took her to Princeton, where one of her customers was none other than Albert Einstein. There was even an article printed in the local weekly the Princeton Packet about the little German immigrant Marriane delivering eggs to Einstein. 

Rathauser recalls wondering when he first began working on the protein what both his grandmother and Einstein would think about him making eggs without chickens.   

He says that back when his grandmother was raising chickens, the egg really was the optimal way of meeting certain culinary needs. What is more, it was right there in the backyard, making it convenient and scalable.  

But, he says, unlike then, today we have the ability to search for better sources of the functionality that the food industry requires.  

It was Eggmented Reality’s Scientific Co-Founder Itai Bloch who was responsible for finding the egg-like protein, with know-how from more than a decade of developing and using algorithms in a variety of industries, including pharmaceutical and agriculture.

Using Bloch’s discovery, fellow Scientific Co-founder and protein specialist Itamar Yadid then inserted the protein’s DNA into a fungus, where it grows naturally.   

Bloch and Yadid were both working at the Migal Galilee Research Institute, based in the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, when they were approached in February 2022 by Dr. Tammy Meiron, Chief Technology Officer at the Fresh Start foodtech incubator. 

Meiron had understood that the food industry needed a better solution than the egg to meet its needs for gelling, binding, foaming, whipping and emulsification.

Bloch and Yadid set up the company that same year as a collaboration between Migal and Fresh Start, using a material science toolkit that combined biology, chemistry and physics to understand and predict how the protein would behave when used in food production.   

Then they honed in on three aspects of the food and beverage industry who would benefit from their R&D: baking products, meat and energy drinks.   

Eggmented Reality realized that the industry is actually eager to find an egg alternative that is price stable and meets environmental, social and governance goals.

The startup says it is able to hit all of those points, for while the microorganism is engineered to produce a foreign protein, the final product is nature-identical and unmodified.  

Furthermore,  Eggmented Reality says it has shown that it can use 40 to 50 percent less of their protein as an egg to achieve the same functionality.  

While there are other companies pursuing an alternative to the egg, Rathauser says that many of them, while using precision fermentation like Eggmented Reality, are still trying to recreate a chicken egg, just without the bird. And this has proven to be a very expensive process.   

These egg alternatives also have other issues, ranging from clogging up machinery to simply not being able to bind ingredients as well as a real egg.  

There have also been attempts to use plant-based proteins to replace the egg, but those typically lack when it comes to the functional capabilities, something that is very important for food and beverage manufacturers when pursuing egg replacements.  

Unsurprisingly, it has been Israel’s war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza and the accompanying attacks on northern Israel from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon that has created Eggmented Reality’s greatest challenge of late. 

The team left their lab in Kiryat Shmona, just a couple of kilometers from the Lebanese border, and never managed to return. They have since relocated twice and at times operated with 40 percent of their team serving in the Israeli army reserves.  

Rathauser explains with a smile that a timetable for when Eggmented Reality expects its product to make its way into food products is “kind of a chicken and egg situation.” 

The company needs partnerships with food and beverage companies in order to move the product forward, but first must secure approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to be available on the American market.  

But having already struck up partnerships with food and beverage giants such as Tnuva, Mondelēz and others, Eggmented Reality says that many in the industry are eager for a product such as its egg.   

And with the support of Fresh Start, the state-run Israel Innovation Authority and online investment platform OurCrowd, the company keeps moving ahead, hopeful that its better egg will appear in food products as soon as 2026.   

The post Cracking The Code Of Creating A Better Egg – Without The Chicken appeared first on NoCamels.

Since Louise Joy Brown became the first child born through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1978, around eight million babies have been brought into the world using this method, in which an egg is fertilized by sperm outside of the body and then the embryo is implanted into the mother’s womb.  

With Israel being the world leader in IVF procedures (in 2018 alone, the US Department of Health says it had almost twice the number of IVF cycles as the next country on the list, Japan), it is not surprising that a revolution in the efficacy of the treatment should also be Israeli. 

In fact, while the global fertility rate has plummeted to an average of 2.3 per woman, Israel is the sole developed nation where it is above that number, with an average of 2.9 births per woman.  

Tel Aviv-based AIVF, which uses AI to select the embryo with the best chance of being successfully implanted into a woman’s womb, was a startup co-founded by embryologist Daniella Gilboa following the completion of her PhD thesis on the topic. 

Gilboa, who has worked as an embryologist for 15 years, is internationally respected in her field, with a role in global policymaking and membership in  various committees of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. 

“I live and breathe embryos,” she tells NoCamels. “I am very connected to the ecosystem.” 

In 2018, Gilboa joined forces with AIVF co-founder and reproductive medicine expert Prof. Daniel Seidman to create the company. Seidman, she says, is one of the busiest doctors in his field in Israel. Gilboa is CEO and Stanford-trained Seidman the chief medical officer. 

“He brings the voice of the physician as well as the voice of the patient, and I bring the voice of the embryologist,” Gilboa says. 

Working together, the concept of applying AI to boost the chances of women undergoing IVF began to crystallize.  

“We started this to do better embryo evaluation, better embryo selection and really take out the human subjectivity,” she explains. 

“Once you’re able to do this, you can really optimize success rates and the treatments, and this is the way to democratize IVF globally.” 

Gilboa says embryologists like herself – who are usually experts in developmental biology – do have the expertise to evaluate the health of an embryo by monitoring different milestones and parameters throughout its growth. 

But, she clarifies, relying solely on human judgment means that there is no standardization in the field when it comes to deciding which embryos fertilized in vitro are the most viable. 

And, Gilboa warns, there is a “huge” range of the quality in clinics when it comes to individual IVF clinics and the services they offer, especially given that IVF is a worldwide phenomenon. 

“You could have junior embryologists evaluating the embryos and really making the big $1 million decision of which embryo becomes a baby – this is in their hands,” she says. 

Seidman and Gilboa began with the premise that an AI platform would be better than the human eye at the “crucial point“ of evaluating the viability of embryos in the lab and determining which of a woman’s fertilized eggs was most likely to result in a successful pregnancy. 

Using “a huge amount”of biological data, Gilboa tells NoCamels, AIVF’s “EMA” platform was trained to understand developmental biology in order to detect milestones and parameters in the developing embryo, each of which correlates to the desired outcome, namely pregnancy. 

EMA analyzes an embryo’s development in the incubator from “Day Zero” (fertilization) to about Day 5 or Day 6, just before it is potentially returned to the womb. After those five or six days, Gilboa explains, the AI produces a score for the embryo that translates to its probability of success. 

This not only guides the medical professionals when deciding which embryo to implant, but also helps the patient understand the journey she is experiencing. 

Gilboa says it has made a “massive” difference to the success rates of IVF treatments per clinic and, unexpectedly, has also led to a drastic reduction in failed pregnancies. 

The company says EMA provides a 38 percent higher level of accuracy when compared to the evaluation of an embryologist alone. It also says that embryos with a high EMA score also demonstrate a 70 percent probability of a successful pregnancy. 

Furthermore, Gilboa says, using AI helps move towards standardizing the process involved in selecting a viable embryo. 

“It needs to be standardized across the IVF ecosystem, and this is what we’re trying to do,” she says. “It will get there.”  

The company is now a commercial success, in use in Australia, Brazil, South Korea and a number of European countries, and soon to be launched in the US.

But as testament to its potential in the eyes of Gilboa and Seidman’s peers, in its infancy it received funding from IVF physicians.  

“This was like endorsing the next generation of IVF,” Gilboa says. 

Funding also came from angel investors (individuals using their own money, usually for early-stage startups) and venture capital firms, as well as in the form of grants from the Israel Innovation Authority and the predominantly European R&D program Eureka. 

According to Gilboa, artificial intelligence has already been incorporated into medicine, with every physician having their own AI assistant. This makes the treatment process faster and more accurate, she explains, and allows physicians to improve their own performances with new tools to help make better decisions. 

“And this is what we do in IVF,” she says.  

The post Israeli AI Platform Delivering Baby Boom For IVF Pregnancies appeared first on NoCamels.

For Dr. Shirit Kazum, a sports cardiologist and echocardiographist at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, wearables offer a new way of observing patients and catching any issues they may have at an early stage. 

“We are slowly beginning to understand that we can incorporate this tool as another source of information that follows our athletes,” she tells NoCamels, referencing pulse rate, blood oxygen saturation and even heart function monitoring such as an electrocardiogram (EKG). 

“This is how we can use these wearables as an integral part of the way in which we practice medicine,” Kazum says.  

“We can use this tool as another technological means to allow us to practice medicine better.” 

She points out that smartwatches have become almost ubiquitous and predicts that as their popularity grows even further, they will become even more valuable as a diagnosis tool. 

“There is huge potential here that we can use, which is in effect ongoing monitoring without people being aware that they are being monitored,” she says. 

“And as doctors we need to find our own ways of using this tool as a way of improving our own medical practices.”  

And like with other areas of the high-tech world, Israeli companies have taken this technology and run with it – creating a range of devices to help us eat better, feel better, sleep better and generally live healthier lives. 

Here are just some of the Israeli developments that work towards making us healthier while we simply go about our daily routine. 

Saving Stroke Victims

For successful recovery from a stroke, the speed with which the patient can receive treatment plays an inherent role – and being able to predict when a stroke is about to occur is even more advantageous.  

Medtech startup Avertto says its StrokeAlert device uses cutting-edge pulse wave analysis technology to monitor changes in the blood flow to the brain and alert for a potential stroke. 

The unique pulse wave analysis technology features sensors that first measure a user’s baseline blood flow levels and then measure them again every 2.6 milliseconds to observe any changes. 

The sensors are placed over the carotid arteries – the two major blood vessels on either side of your neck that provide the blood supply to your brain.

The data gathered is transmitted to a smartphone app that will display one of three colors to the user: green means healthy levels; yellow means that the data is still being assessed; and red means high risk of a stroke. 

When the app turns red, an alert is sent out within seconds to the wearer, first responders and healthcare providers. 

Avertto’s Chief Business Development Officer Limor Prigan told NoCamels prior to their development, treatments for a stroke were based on clinical signs, including facial drooping, arm weakness on one side and speech difficulties.

“Once you have a clinical sign, it’s already too late. And then we’re running against time,” she said.  

Super Selfie

While not technically a wearable, our phones have become so much of a part of us that it is fair to say they are almost an extension of our hands. 

Binah.ai (Binah is Hebrew for intelligence) takes advantage of our reliance on our phones to transform them into a diagnosis tool, using artificial intelligence and sensors to remotely monitor your vital signs and biomarkers with medical-grade accuracy via a simple selfie taken yourself. 

These biomarkers include heart and respiratory rates, blood pressure and even hemoglobin levels – with the company planning to add even more.  

The technology works regardless of skin tone, age, sex or ethnicity, Binah co-founder and CEO David Maman told NoCamels.  

 “The core focus of Binah is [to provide] the most basic ability of a basic observation. [In Israel] we live in a very advanced world in terms of medical services – 2.9 doctors for 1,000 people — there are countries in which people still need to drive eight hours in order to see a physician,” he said. 

“So, even though telemedicine has been exploding in the past few years, it is still almost impossible to deliver multiple types of medical devices and multiple types of lab work in order to get the basic observation. And that is what we’ve created at Binah.”

Smooth Signals 

A device made up of electrode patches monitors the body’s key functions through the signals they emit, something that was only previously possible in a clinical setting. 

The Smart Skin device, created by Herzliya-based biotech company X-trodes, can be placed at any point on the body in order to monitor signals showing brain, cardiac, muscle and eye activity. 

The customizable patches are wireless and flexible, and do not require gels or other materials to function.

X-trodes says that while electrophysiological monitoring has traditionally only been available in clinical settings, due to previously cumbersome equipment, the size and ease of use of the new patches mean that patients can now monitor these functions at home or any other location. 

The device, which recently received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), will now be verified for suitability in multiple clinical situations, primarily to check cardiovascular functions and potential sleep disorders.  

“The X-trodes system is the next generation of wearable and fully wireless solutions, enabling clinicians and researchers to unleash the full potential of medical-grade electrophysiological monitoring,” said company CEO Ziv Peremen. 

“Gaining FDA clearance affirms the value of this technology and its potential to improve health and wellness through access to real-time electrophysiological data,” he said. 

Safer Sleeping 

Itamar Medical has developed a small device to diagnose people suffering from sleep disorders such as apnea, a potentially serious disorder that sees a person’s breathing repeatedly stop and start while they are asleep.  

Worn on the wrist with sensors on the finger and chest, Itamar’s WatchPAT device measures and analyzes the pulse rate of the sleeper, which increases in the event of apnea due to the collapse of the airways and the lack of supply of fresh air. 

The device is paired with the user’s smartphone and an accompanying app collects and transmits the data it gathers for clinical review.

The company says the three points of contact, coupled with patient compliance, give their device a 98 percent success rate in diagnosing the disorder. 

The post Our Heart Monitors On Our Sleeves: Wearables Watch Over Wellness appeared first on NoCamels.

For the average healthy person, the blood-brain barrier (BBB), an extra layer found on blood vessels in the brain, is what protects and defends the sensitive organ from harmful substances, germs and many other sources of potential damage. 

But when it comes to treating brain cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, the blood-brain barrier is less of a protective layer and more of a hindrance to effective treatments, presenting one of the biggest medical challenges in modern medicine today. 

Nanocarry Therapeutics is hoping to bring an end to this devastating situation. The Ness Ziona-based biopharmaceutical company is developing a novel class of drugs, based on their innovative nano-platform technology, which are able to increase penetration to the BBB and deliver potentially life-saving therapies to the brain.  

“This platform has limitless possibilities because we can attach any antibody to it and deliver it to the brain,” Michal Roytman Haham, Chief Business Officer of Nanocarry, tells NoCamels.

With a successful non-invasive technology for traversing the blood-brain barrier, Nanocarry could ultimately extend the reach of already existing therapies to the brain – a location that was previously out of reach.  

To get the process started, the company selected HER2 positive breast cancer brain metastases as the area of focus for their first drug development.

The Mayo Clinic explains HER2 positive metastatic breast cancer as a condition that tests positive for a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), which promotes the growth of cancer cells. 

Nanocarry says it chose to tackle this medical condition because there is already a highly effective treatment for HER2 metastatic breast cancer, but it is in desperate need of what the company is offering – a successful platform to deliver the drug through the BBB to provide direct treatment to the brain. 

Roytman Haham says that while HER2 positive metastatic breast cancer has undergone a “really dramatic revolution” over the past two decades, primarily due to the introduction of biological therapies, this unfortunately does not include the cases that have spread to the brain, which happens in 50 percent of patients, because of the inability of these biological drugs to cross the BBB in sufficient quantities. 

“The drugs that normally work very well outside the brain cannot enter the brain and therefore, the prognosis actually plummets to less than one year,” Roytman Haham tells NoCamels. 

“This is exactly what we were looking for when searching for a disease where our technology can make a real difference in patients’ lives. A disease that has a systemic and brain manifestation and while the systemic disease, meaning outside the brain, is treated effectively, the brain remains unreachable,” she says. 

“That leads to an extremely tragic situation where women who achieved disease control and potentially still have a life to live, lose their lives because of brain metastases.” 

Roytman Haham explains that for metastatic HER2 positive breast cancer that has not metastasized to the brain, there has been transformative advancement in treatment over the past 20 years, with the introduction of biological therapy. 

Known commercially as Herceptin (trastuzumab) and Perjeta (pertuzumab), these two antibodies are considered the gold standard in treating HER2 positive metastatic  breast cancer patients. 

With the help of Nanocarry’s BBB technology platform, Herceptin and Perjeta could penetrate the blood-brain barrier, together, to reach the brain and deliver treatment directly to the site of the tumor, potentially transforming the survival of patients with brain metastases as well.  

Indeed, the US government’s National Cancer Institute says HER2 positive breast cancer that has not spread to any other organs in the body or the axillary lymph nodes has a 5-year relative survival rate of between 97.3 to 98.8 percent. 

Roytman Haham stresses that Nanocarry is not the only company that targets blood-brain barrier penetration, with both invasive and noninvasive technologies already under development.  

While the technologies that are invasive do disrupt the blood-brain barrier, the noninvasive technologies are based on a scientific concept called the “trojan horse,” which leverages the brain’s natural processes by targeting receptors on the BBB, enabling large molecules to enter the brain. 

Nanocarry says it has innovatively combined this approach with nanoparticle technology to enhance its effectiveness. The company is using insulin as its trojan horse, attached to nano-particles that also carry multiple copies of antibodies. 

The insulin binds to insulin receptors that are abundant on the BBB cells, resulting in quick internalization across the barrier and providing efficient drug delivery.

What sets Nanocarry apart from the other “trojan horse” technologies is that it is the only company able to utilize insulin as the shuttle molecule, made possible by the distinctive design of their gold nanoparticles platform. Insulin is considered to be 10 times more effective than other shuttle molecules in penetrating the blood-brain barrier and delivering treatment. 

This capability holds great promise in delivering sufficient doses required for diseases such as breast cancer brain metastases.

“It remains stable, and it reaches the brain, safely delivering the drug in high amounts. So basically, we’re the only company that has been able to devise this very, very effective shuttle across the blood-brain barrier,” Roytman Haham says.

The first therapy being developed with Nanocarry’s BBB technology carries multiple copies of Herceptin and Projeta, delivering them directly to the tumor site inside of the brain.

The potentially lifesaving technology was developed over the course of a decade at the Bar Ilan University Faculty of Engineering, in the lab of Prof. Rachela Popovtzer, a world expert in nanomedicine and today Nanocarry’s chief scientific officer. And the solution was formulated by Nanocarry COO Dr. Oshra Betzer as part of her PhD and postdoctoral work.  

Popovtzer and Betzer founded Nanocarry in 2021, along with its CEO and experienced biotech executive Dr. Revital Mandil Levin. Today, the three women founders run the company with their small team, also made up primarily of women.  

Having successfully completed proof of concept studies in animal models, the biopharmaceutical company is now starting their studies towards receiving Investigational New Drug (IND) status by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is granted to experimental therapies for serious or immediately life-threatening conditions that show promise in clinical testing. 

With the urgent unmet needs in treatment of brain metastases in breast cancer patients, Roytman Haham explains, the FDA usually expedites the approval process for pharmaceutical companies in order to bring such life-saving treatments to market as soon as possible.  

Based on the timeline for drugs that have been approved for similar life-threatening diseases, Nanocarry are confident that they will have that fast track to market. Nanocarry expects to run two clinical trials, which are estimated to begin next year, followed by the expedited FDA approval.  

“Our results are truly unprecedented,” says Roytman Haham. 

“We’ve shown massive brain penetration and accumulation within the tumor site and very significant tumor growth inhibition – exactly the effect these drugs achieve outside the brain.” 

In its early days, Nanocarry’s main backer was the US-Israeli venture capital firm NFX. Additional firms now also provide funding, including Sapir Venture Partners and UnBox Ventures, the on-site venture studio at Bar-Ilan University. It has also received support from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to promoting the national high-tech sector, and several private investors.  

Nanocarry is focusing first on FDA approval, which it intends to follow with EU authorization, and hopes to be on the market in 2028.  

If they achieve their date target, Nanocarry will have made it to market just seven years after the company’s founding. The development time of new drugs takes on average 10 to 15 years, and even longer for newer branches of medicine. 

Ultimately, Nanocarry hopes to continue to develop their BBB drugs and provide more effective forms of treatment for many of the other devastating brain diseases for which treatment has proven elusive.  

“Potentially, we can attach any drug and deliver it to the brain,” Roytman Haham concludes, “unlocking limitless possibilities in a wide range of central nervous system diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, neuro-inflammatory diseases and beyond.”  

The post Penetrating Brain’s Natural Barrier To Deliver Life-Saving Drugs appeared first on NoCamels.

Veinway CEO and co-founder Jordan Pollack tells NoCamels that chronic venous disorders – a term covering a gamut of issues from varicose veins to pulmonary embolism – affect just under 10 percent of the global population and can greatly impair overall health and quality of life.  

Among these disorders is blocked veins caused by blood clots, including deep vein thrombosis (DVT) – blood clots deep within the body. And successfully unblocking these veins, usually in the legs, has proven to be an unanswered challenge. 

Pollack says that healthcare systems are not really set up to deal with patients with this issue, as it has not been a priority for them. 

Patients with blood clots, he claims, are often brushed off with compression stockings, which gently squeeze the legs to stimulate blood circulation, or anticoagulants, which thin the blood. Neither of these, he says, is really a permanent or fully effective solution. 

Indeed, the US Center for Advanced Cardiac and Vascular Interventions says that stockings do not actually dislodge already formed clots, while top American hospital the Mayo Clinic says that blood thinners do reduce the risk of clotting but cannot prevent it altogether.  

These blood clots have to be treated within two to three weeks, Pollack explains. After that, the clot transforms into scar tissue made up of collagen, a protein found throughout the body, and fibrin, an unyielding substance formed from the fibrinogen protein in the blood.

 “You no longer have a vein essentially,” Pollack says.

When clinicians do try invasive intervention by inserting a stent to clear a clot, he explains, they use the same technique as for a blocked artery. 

“But it’s a completely different procedure than in the arteries,” he says. “Trying to place a stent is often an exercise in futility and definitely frustration.” 

Pollack tells NoCamels that physicians are simply not using the right tools to deal with blood clots, and are in fact still using methods from the 1980s – such as guide wires and balloons – to traverse the blood clot and open up the vein.  

“I’ve seen a lot of MacGyver-like improvisations,” he says, referring to the ‘80s TV action hero known for his ad hoc solutions. 

“I’ve seen all kinds of craziness because nobody’s given them the right tools that they need to be successful.” 

He explains that for the past three or four decades, interventional vascular medicine has focused on arterial disorders, which have more immediate and serious ramifications than venous disorders. 

“Veins are often called the forgotten vessels,” he says. 

Veinway’s solution is called Traversa, a catheter-based device that uses proprietary technology to be more flexible than other incarnations and which is uniquely designed to deal with blocked veins. 

“It’s the first device designed for crossing chronic occlusions in veins,” says Pollack, whose background is in biomedical engineering. “It’s designed to guarantee crossing quickly and safely.”

The device comprises an inflatable balloon and a steerable needle that can be bent by as much as 60 degrees, rotate a full 360 degrees and move both forward and backward. 

“[This gives] three independent degrees of freedom,” he says.  

The needle is encased inside the balloon, which, when inflated within the vein, acts as anchor to hold the device in place while the needle advances forward through the blockage. 

Pollack compares the consistency of the scar tissue in a blocked vein to a car tire or chewed-up piece of gum. 

“We designed a device specifically for dealing with this kind of material,” he says. 

Traversa has yet to begin full human trials, but Pollack says it has already been used in a small number of cases in the US and Europe in a compassionate use setting, when a patient is facing a grave or life-threatening disease and there are no other potential solutions. 

He explains that in those cases, the device demonstrated its ability to break through blockages that no other intervention has been able to permeate. 

“We crossed them quickly and reliably,” he says. 

The Or Yehuda-based Veinway was established in 2020 at the initiative of the Israeli MedTech incubator MEDX Xelerator, whose core mission is to build and support “high impact” ventures that resolve unmet clinical issues.   

“I took just the unmet need as a challenge,” Pollack recalls. “We learned about it and then we brainstormed and developed it ourselves.”  

The young startup is now nearing the end of its Series A funding round. It has also had investment from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to promoting the national tech sector, as well as MEDX and its long-term partner Boston Scientific, a leading US biomedical engineering firm. 

And it is the US market that Veinway is primarily focused on, where Pollack says some 900,000 people are diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis every year (although there are similar levels of diagnosis in Europe too). The company hopes to have completed its human trials and be ready for market by the third quarter of 2025.  

Pollack says that Traversa’s solution takes on even more significance when one considers the fact that venous diseases do not just afflict the elderly, and can be caused by a genetic disposition such as hypercoagulability, when the blood clots more easily. 

And because many people suffer from these disorders while they are still young, treatments will stay with them for decades and not just a handful of years – making a reliable, long-term solution all the more critical. 

“The healthcare system has to understand that these are patients that when you treat them… you’re going to have to follow them for their entire lives,” he says. 

“It’s one of these things that I think there’s a lack of awareness around.”

The post Coming Through! Device Clears Veins Blocked By Clots, Scar Tissue   appeared first on NoCamels.

One such investigation is being carried out at Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel’s respected public research university.

A team at Weizmann’s Brain Sciences Department, led by research neuroscientist Dr. Takashi Kawashima and visiting psychiatrist Dr. Dotan Braun, is working to determine psychedelics’ impact on behavior and individual brain cells – with the aim of helping people with mental health disorders.

“Some types of psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin [aka magic mushrooms] and MDMA [aka ecstasy], have shown promise as therapies for treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder,” wrote the US Department of Health just last year. 

And it is psilocybin that is the focus of Kawashima and Dotan’s research, tying it to the effect of serotonin, a chemical in the brain that has many functions – including acting as a mood stabilizer. 

“I have been studying how serotonin works in the brain for 14 years,” Kawashima, who is also a qualified medical doctor, tells NoCamels. 

“And the psychedelic boom came and [we understood] psilocybin works as a serotonin mimic in the brain.”

The team’s objective is to determine whether it is possible to develop psychedelic alternatives to the most commonly prescribed antidepressants, known as serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). 

These SSRIs, which include Prozac and Cipralex, prevent the reabsorption of serotonin, leaving more of it in the brain and potentially reducing the negativity of various forms of stress. 

“SSRIs elevate serotonin levels throughout the brain,” according to Braun. 

“Psychedelics, in contrast, affect serotonin receptors via a different, much faster mechanism and they appear to act on brain areas in a more targeted manner,” he said. 

“A better understanding of their mechanism of action and a mapping of their influence on the brain may lead to more efficient drugs, with fewer side effects.”

Braun explains that while such therapies will not become the de facto standard for mental health, they could provide a lifeline for the significant number of patients who do not respond to current treatments. 

“No one said that it’s going to be the first line of treatment for everything,” he tells NoCamels. “But [for] people with treatment resistant depression – about 30 to 40 percent of the patients – we did not have anything to offer to them.” 

Kawashima also highlights that SSRIs have unwelcome side effects, including insomnia and sexual dysfunction, as well as the limited effectiveness. But, he says, until now the field of psychiatry had been “stuck” for decades on this kind of therapy.  

Exploring just how psilocybin has a positive effect on mood, the team is using immature, larval zebrafish – which are completely transparent – to measure the effects of the psychedelic on the brain. 

Kawashima also says the serotonin system in fish and humans is “very similar,” making zebrafish the ideal model to understand how serotonin controls behavior.  

The fish were placed in a psilocybin “bath” and their behavior monitored and compared to the actions of fish who had not been exposed to the psychedelic. 

The team found that the fish who had been exposed to psilocybin displayed less stress-related behavior than their “sober” counterparts when experiencing a sudden, temporary drop in water temperature. 

They were more likely to explore their environment, even in the darker recesses of their tank, and also moved more quickly. 

These two differences led the team to conclude that the psychedelic reduced stress and even acted as a stimulant.  

Using a combination of AI, advanced image analysis and optical microscopy, the researchers also examined the brain activity of the zebrafish in relation to serotonin.

“You can see individual neurons at single cell resolution while the fish is alive,” Kawashima explains. “So we can see the entire serotonin system in action.” 

The research is very much still in the early stages, but the team is already working with Yeda, Weizmann’s technology transfer, to help current work in the pharmaceutical industry with psychedelic treatments. 

Kawashima believes that these researchers could use their method to test new drug compounds or compare the relative usefulness of the serotonin-targeting drugs already in use. 

“I think our job is to find what the psilocybin is doing in the brain,” he says. “Because the entire field doesn’t know how the psychedelic is working, especially how and where it’s acting on to improve depression symptoms.”

This, he posits, could help make discoveries about the mechanics of serotonin-related disorders, and from there possibly generate completely new approaches to the treatment of disorders such as depression, PTSD and even addiction. 

For Braun the psychiatrist, whose own patients include some people suffering from severe trauma, psychedelics could work where traditional therapies were not as effective as had been hoped. 

“I think it’s for the best to try to offer them something,” he says. “Sometimes it could be much better than very, very high doses of conservative drugs.” 

The post Fish Help Fathom Psychedelics As Treatment For Depression, PTSD appeared first on NoCamels.

A group of medical professionals with their own knowledge and personal experience of fractures have created a method of heightening bone regeneration, enhancing the body’s natural healing processes.   

A fracture heals in a series of stages: First the body forms blood clots at the site of the injury to mark the start of the process, which is then followed by the creation of a temporary bone (soft callus) to hold the bone together as it begins to heal. This soft callus is slowly replaced by regenerated bone (also known as hard callus), which continues to strengthen even after a cast or brace is removed.  

OrthoTreat says its treatment helps in every step of this healing process. 

“What we’re doing is regulating the cascade of bone regeneration and improving it,” OrthoTreat co-founder Dr. Hilik Marom tells NoCamels. 

OrthoTreat’s ModulX therapy is administered via an injection at the site of a fracture. The gel-like substance contains two separate components – a known medication and a plant-based molecule. 

And according to Marom, this combination enhances the process of bone regeneration in two different ways – by strengthening the bone and by improving its psychological structure. 

The gel is applied directly onto the surface of the bone as a bonding agent when the two sides cannot be fully brought back together or as a supplement to bones that have sustained more debilitating damage. 

Borrowing technological terminology, Marom compares ModulX to software rather than hardware. The therapy is designed to facilitate the body’s own healing mechanisms rather than introducing external apparatus such as a graft or screws to hold a broken bone in place as it knits back together. 

Even so, Marom says, the ModulX gel can also be used alongside such therapies, depending on the state of the bone and the kind of injury it has sustained.  

“You just have to apply it on the surface of the bone,” says Marom. “This is it. As long as you’re in contact with a bone, it works.” 

The one-off treatment is slowly released over approximately 21 days, a period the company says is crucial in bone healing.  

“The majority of the effect that we bring will be in those first three weeks,” OrthoTreat CEO Sahar Meiron tells NoCamels. 

“[This] will massively improve that healing time and strength, bringing a much better environment for the body to do its own work.” 

A way to facilitate healing in bone fractures has long eluded researchers, Marom says.  

“The new solution of bone regeneration is the Holy Grail,” he explains. “Everyone is looking for it.”  

Marom worked as a researcher in two different bone laboratories, participating in multiple efforts to improve the healing process for bone fractures, all of which were unsuccessful. 

“We were failing again and again and again,” he says, explaining that in all of the different attempts, at most they could enhance the healing process by 5-10 percent. 

“And that’s really not significant – it’s not really an improvement,” he says. 

OrthoTreat, however, says its treatment can improve bone regeneration by up to 35 percent and even reduce the perils that come with any surgery. 

“We are improving the outcomes and we are minimizing risks, which is the optimal for any orthopedist or traumatologist,” Marom says.  

Indeed, the funding for the Tel Aviv-based startup, which was founded in 2020, has largely come from experts in the field of orthopedics and stakeholders such as sports professionals who often suffer from bone injuries. 

“We have many orthopedics worldwide who have been investing,” says Meiron. “Some small biotech companies and people who have an understanding of the need within different areas.” 

In fact, the startup’s British chief medical officer, Prof. Mansoor Khan, initially expressed interest in OrthoTreat as a potential investor but within days joined the company. 

“You’ve not got people who are just throwing money at it,” says Khan, a visiting professor at Imperial College London, consultant in major trauma for the National Health Service and former head of surgery in the Royal Navy. 

“You’ve got people who are experts in the field of trauma investing. You’ve got people who know what they’re talking about, willing to put their money where their mouth is,” he tells NoCamels. 

The company aims to complete its human trials and be on the market by 2028 with a product whose price will make it an option worldwide – including in developing nations. 

“If you look at the price of this drug, it’s probably going to be less than one screw that orthopedic surgeons use,” says Khan. “It’s affordable, it works, it’s safe, and it can be brought to market very, very soon.”

Meiron says ModulX merely helps the human body to heal in the optimal way possible. 

“The body knows how to play the music, it knows how to play the tune,” he says. “We are the conductor.” 

The post New Gel Jab Aims To Help Broken Bones Heal Back Better  appeared first on NoCamels.

The World Health Organization says Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia, with around 40 million sufferers worldwide in 2023. There is no cure for or even a universally accepted cause of the disease, despite it being first diagnosed more than a century ago.

In 2017, Dr. Amir Glik, the director of Cognitive Neurology at Beilinson Hospital, realized that of his Jewish patients experiencing cognitive decline, well over half were Sephardi Jews – those who originate from Spain and Portugal in Southern Europe and later North Africa and the Middle East. 

“I started asking myself, why does it happen?” Glik tells NoCamels. “Whether my feeling is something that I can prove with statistical methods or is it just a feeling.” 

Glik and his team then began to go through hundreds of patient files at the hospital’s cognitive neurology clinic, some dating back years, to see whether there were statistics to back up this intuition. 

“After doing the work, examining hundreds of patients, we saw that this is correct,” Glik says. 

What they found was that 64 percent of the Jewish patients with early onset dementia were Sephardi, as compared to 36 percent Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Northern Europe. 

The team then went to Israel’s Health Ministry and other government bodies to acquire annually updated data, which also bore out the trend that they had uncovered at Beilinson. 

Glik stresses that the study relates to people aged around 60, who are below the average age for Alzheimer’s diagnosis but older than those who have genetic inclination to develop the disease in their 40s. 

According to Glik, Israel’s relatively homogeneous population makes it easier to identify genetic trends within certain ethnic groups and then expand any findings out to more diverse communities. 

“The idea when you do a genetic study is to take a population that is a closed population,” he says. “[And] people who studied genetics said that Israel is heaven from a genetical standpoint.”  

Glik explains that in a closed population such as Israel, less diversity means there will be a higher percentage of the population with certain genetic risk factors, making them easier to locate. 

“In order to find a genetic risk factor in a homogenic population like the Ashkenazi Jews, or like the [Sephardi] Jews, you need a much lower number of participants in order to find the genetic risk factors,” he says.

He gives the example of the Israeli research that discovered that Ashkenazi Jewish women are more genetically disposed to developing breast cancer. This is because one in every 40 Ashkenazi Jewish women has a mutation of the BRCA gene, something which increases the risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer at a young age. Conversely, only one in every 140 Sephardi Jewish women has the gene mutation.  

Once identified, Glik says, these risk factors can then be examined in more heterogenic populations such as in the United States or Europe. 

Glik maintains that in the past few years there has been a subtle “revolution” going on in the study of Alzheimer’s disease, unbeknown to most people. 

He highlights the introduction of two new drugs to “clean” the build up of the Amyloid beta protein in the brain, which is thought to be one of the primary factors in the development of Alzheimer’s. A third new drug is expected to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the summer. 

“What happened in psychiatry 20, 30 years ago is now happening in Alzheimer’s disease” Glik says.  

Indeed, the Beilinson study has drawn attention from the US government. Its National Institute of Health has provided $13 million to expand Glik’s genetic research into a joint study with Boston University School of Medicine and three other Israeli medical centers. 

The hope is that this will help advance early detection, treatment and care for sufferers of the disease. 

“We want to know what are the mechanisms that cause Alzheimer’s disease,” Glik says.

“If we know the genes that are risk factors for the disease, then we can learn about the mechanisms of the disease and maybe find a drug that can interfere in this mechanism, and postpone disease development. That’s the aim.” 

The post Jewish Genes Open Door For Potential Alzheimer’s Breakthrough appeared first on NoCamels.

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 the body) “in systems that mimic our body,” Dr. Tomer Bronstein, Bonus Biogroup VP of Business Development, tells NoCamels. 

Millions of people lose bone tissue every year for a variety of reasons, he explains, including trauma, war, osteoporosis (loss of bone quality) or cancer. 

“Until now, the gold standard for patients who have lost bone tissue was to take a bone from one location in the body and to move it into the graft location,” Bronstein explains. 

“For example, if you’re losing bone in the lower jaw, you can take one of the ribs, cut it and put it over there. And it’s being done in millions of patients every year worldwide,” he says. 

This is simple to do when the process involves a small amount of tissue, Bronstein says, but using larger amounts of bone means leaving a gap in the original location.  

“This was the gold standard until Bonus came to the table,” he says. 

The Bonus Biogroup proprietary BonoFill platform involves taking cells from the body that Bronstein calls “damage control” cells, and growing them according to the needs of the individual patient. 

“We grow them in vitro to the amount and specification we need within the trauma or gap area, and then within a relatively short time we have enough bone to fill the cavity,” he says.  

These cells are known as mesenchymal cells (MSCs), that can both renew themselves and change their function.  

“These are the regeneration agents of the body,” explains Bonus CEO Dr. Shai Meretzki. “They are responsible for creating three types of tissue – fat, cartilage and bone tissue… We are taking them from the fat tissue of the patient himself.”

The cells are placed into a bioreactor that recreates the conditions for growth inside the human body and after two weeks the tissue can be injected into the gap in the bone. 

Every patient receives a transplant solely made up of their own original cells, which Bronstein explains is the only way to create “seamless” repair with tissue that will stay in the body for life.

“You cannot actually tell where the cavity was: it’s completely healthy, completely normal bone,” he says. “We’re talking about full and complete healing.” 

Meretzki gives the example of successful bone replacement for a man involved in a vehicular accident that left him with a gap of eight centimeters in the bone in a lower leg. 

“This patient underwent three prior failed interventions before being treated by BonoFill,” he tells NoCamels. “He was nearly two years in a wheelchair and at a certain point they considered amputating the leg, because it had no function.”

But just two and a half months after the procedure, Meretzki says, the man was able to jump up and down, and a year and half after the tissue replacement he participated in an Ironman competition. 

Another case involved a man who ignored toothache caused by a bacterial cyst that ultimately caused a sizable hole in his lower jaw. BonoFill was placed into the hole, and six months later the man was able to have tooth implants in the regenerated bone. 

BonoFill has completed phase two clinical trials for facial reconstructions, with a 90-percent success rate, Bronstein says. The company is now entering phase three trials in the US, where it aims to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

The use of BonoFill for limbs is still in phase two trials in Israel. The trial, which is taking place in six locations, was recently expanded to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon. The expansion was designed to help treat the victims of the October 7 terror attack and Israeli soldiers who were wounded in the subsequent war against Hamas in Gaza. 

“Most of the soldiers are protected by body armor, but the limbs are completely exposed,” Meretzki says. “We are doing what we can in order to assist and facilitate healing in this area as well.” 

Founded in 2008, the Haifa-based company has to date raised a reported $60 million in funding from private investment, and today is publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. 

And according to Meretzki, Bonus’ competitors are “somewhere in very early academic research on animals and years behind in terms of development.” 

In January, the company received the Cell Therapy Biotech Innovation Award at Advanced Therapies Week, a prestigious international conference held in the US to showcase global innovative treatments.  

“Bonus Biogroup is recognized as one of the leading – if not the leading – entities in the world in these areas of cell therapy and tissue engineering,” says Meretzki.

The company is now developing other therapeutics based on the same process,  aiming to create blood vessels for transplanted organs to help stop the body rejecting them and to mitigate inflammation that can prove deadly in respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 and pneumonia.  

To Meretzki, the future holds boundless opportunities for healing, as long as the ideas are there. 

“[First Israeli Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion said that in order to be a realist in the State of Israel, you need to believe in miracles,” he says. 

The post Growing Bone From Your Own Tissue For ‘Seamless’ Healing  appeared first on NoCamels.

And according to the Israeli university where it was developed, this innovative therapy has shown delayed progression of the disease by up to 36 percent in patients with early-to-mild cognitive impairment.

The treatment was developed by a researcher at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv in conjunction with scientists in Italy, and takes a different approach to an accepted method of slowing the spread of Alzhiemer’s. 

The disease, which according to the World Health Organization is the most common type of dementia, affecting up to 40 million sufferers worldwide in 2023, is known to have no cure. And even though it was first diagnosed in 1906, there has yet to be a universally accepted cause of the disease.

The Amyloid beta (A-beta) protein is believed to be one of the primary factors in the development of Alzheimer’s, as it forms what is known as amyloid plaque that accumulates in the brains of people with the disease. This plaque forms in the spaces between the nerve cells, which disrupts cell function in memory, atrophying key areas of the brain and ultimately causing significant loss of its functionality. 

The existing treatments that focus on A-beta center on a non-soluble form of the  protein as the cause of the plaque, while the novel treatment developed under the auspices of Prof. Shai Rahimipour of Bar-Ilan’s Department of Chemistry attacks the soluble, oligomeric (made up of repeating units of the same limited number of molecules) form.  

New research pointed to plaque formed by this smaller, soluble form of the A-beta protein as causing the neural impairment and cognitive decline of Alzheimer’s rather than the long-targeted non-soluble form.  

“Until 10 years ago, it was a consensus that these non-soluble networks of plaques are responsible for Alzheimer’s,” Rahimipour tells NoCamels. 

“For that reason, many companies started to develop diagnostics and therapeutics to treat these non-soluble amyloids,” he says. 

But, he explains, while they were able to reduce the amount of the non-soluble amyloids, this did not have any real impact on the progression of the disease, and people were still dying from it. 

“So it became a question of whether these non-soluble amyloids are responsible for the disease,” he says.    

Based on this new research, Rahimipour together with Professors Angelo Monguzzi and Marcello Campione from the University of Milano-Bicocca decided to target the smaller, soluble molecules rather than the larger, non-soluble ones. 

The three researchers designed nanoparticles that would target the early stages of these soluble A-beta proteins, preventing them from clumping (aggregating) inside the brain and forming the amyloid plaque.  

Rahimipour explains that he has been considering this avenue of treatment since he opened his lab a little over a decade ago. 

“We suspected from the beginning that this oligomeric form is more toxic, because you can see the same phenomena of toxicity with small proteins, which when they are aggregated in the soluble form are very, very toxic,” he says.  

“So we started to generate molecules that can specifically bind to this kind of oligomer and inhibit the toxicity and aggregation of the plaques.” 

The scientists drew inspiration from cancer research, specifically the concept of using light to inhibit harmful proteins. 

They decided to use molecules that have a chemical reaction to light (photosynthesizers), which could harm A-beta’s amino acids – the molecules that make up all proteins. 

To do this, they used a photosynthesizer that has already been approved by the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA). 

“We showed very nicely that when you are incubating A-beta with an FDA-approved photosynthesizer, you can damage A-beta very specifically in very specific amino acids and inhibit the aggregation [of] these oligomers – and we saw that the toxicity is going down,” he says.

They dealt with the issue of triggering the reaction to light inside the body when they stumbled across research showing certain nanoparticles can create a light source when exposed to x-rays. 

“Basically it means that if you have these kinds of nanoparticles and you shine an x-ray, it generates visible light,” he explains. “And this visible light can activate our photosynthesizer.” 

So the treatment became a two-stage therapy: First, they introduced the photosynthesizer to the A-beta protein in the brain. Then, they introduced the nanoparticles that when x-rayed trigger the light reaction by the photosynthesizer needed to impact the amino acids. The x-rays are very low powered in order to shield the brain as much as possible from harm. 

The researchers tested their hypothesis in very small worms, reproducing the soluble A-beta molecules and then the effect of the nanoparticles and photosynthesizer on them. 

They are now about to embark on the proof-of-concept stage using larger animals and hope to have more solid results in the next six months, although Rahimipour warns that actually bringing the therapy to market is still several years away.  

Although still in the preliminary stages of development, the scientists are now looking to partner with an established pharmaceutical company for funding and support to help navigate the long path to commercialization.  

“We have a lot of experience with early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease,” Ranimipour says.  

“The most important thing is the notion that Alzheimer’s disease should be detected in its very early stage and this is what we have in mind.” 

The post Alzheimer’s Treatment Uses Light & X-Rays To Hit Harmful Protein appeared first on NoCamels.

OncoHost’s main focus is on treatments for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). According to the World Cancer Research Fund, lung cancer is the second most common cancer (after breast cancer) and responsible for 12.2 percent of new cases of the disease. 

In fact, OncoHost CEO Ofer Sharon tells NoCamels, lung cancer “is the number one killer” among patients with this form of the disease. 

The startup’s proprietary PROphet platform uses AI to scan up to 7,000 proteins in a patient’s blood, using a single test, to see how receptive that person would be to immunotherapy to treat their tumors.  

“Those proteins are telling a story about the biology of the cancer, the biology of the immune system and the biology of the resistance mechanisms,” Sharon says. 

“Those same proteins are the basis of our algorithm; they also allow us to differentiate between patients who will benefit from treatment and those who won’t.” 

PROphet has a two-fold purpose, Sharon explains. First, it determines whether a patient will benefit from the treatment based on the test of the proteins in the blood. 

Secondly, if the patient is suitable for immunotherapy, the platform can help the doctors decide whether to pursue that as a sole treatment or to combine it with chemotherapy in order to optimize the chances of a positive outcome. 

“[This is] a frequent, almost daily dilemma that oncologists are dealing with in lung cancer,” he says. 

“When you start treatment, you have several options and it’s really important. There are several studies showing that the treatment you choose in the first line has a huge impact on the patient’s actual overall survival over time,” he explains. 

“So it’s very important to choose right from the beginning.”  

The platform tests for proteins that have been present in the blood plasma of patients who did not respond to immunotherapy but are not present for patients who did. 

Sharon calls proteins “the building blocks of the biological processes in the body,” explaining that each one present in the blood plasma has a biological reason for being there. 

By identifying those proteins, he explains, OncoHost can begin to understand which biological pathways are actually driving the resistance to immunotherapy, which is based on encouraging the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells. 

Sharon says that while immunotherapy is the largest growing sector of cancer therapies in the last eight years, being used to treat almost every form of the disease, there have only been “moderate” clinical results. 

“It is a great improvement compared to what we had 20 years ago, but we are at a point where in lung cancer only 20 to 30 percent of the patients will actually benefit from [immunotherapy] treatment,” he says.  

“Immunotherapy or immunotherapy combined with chemo, it doesn’t really matter,” he explains. “Most patients are not benefiting from treatment and we really don’t understand why.” 

PROphet is based on the research of Prof. Yuval Shaked, Chief Scientific Advisor at OncoHost; head of the Integrated Cancer Center at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa; and president of the International Cancer Microenvironmental Society, which works to advance new treatments for the disease. 

Shaked’s research for the past decade has focused on how the body’s response to treatment for cancer is critical to the patient’s ability to benefit from it. Sharon says that this is a massive change in how oncologists perceive the treatment of the disease, where previously only the interaction between the tumor and the therapy had been examined. 

“When you look at cancer, there are actually three elements that take part in this interplay: the patient, the tumor and the treatment,” Sharon says. “How our own body responds to the anti-cancer treatment plays a critical role in our ability as patients to benefit from the treatment.”

Sharon says that proteins play a major role in three central hypotheses on why immunotherapy does not work in many patients: 

The immune system itself may be reluctant to attack the cancer cells due to the threat to healthy surrounding cells; tumors, which require a great deal of nutrients to grow, create their own blood vessels to increase their “food” supply; and the rapid proliferation of cancer cells within the body. 

“We see proteins that are involved in pathways that belong to the immune system, in pathways that belong to cell proliferation and the time involved in the creation of new blood vessels, and that gives us a direction as to why the patient is not benefiting from the treatment,” he explains.

Sharon believes that the Binyamina-based startup is the only medtech company in Israel currently working on the impact of proteins on cancer treatment, simply because it is an extremely complex line of research. 

“How to measure, how to understand what you see is a tool that requires a lot of integration of a lot of data points from different sources,” he says.

And while there are others working on the same premise around the world – he calls proteins “the next frontier in immunotherapy” – OncoHost is one of the most advanced in its progress. 

“Right now, the tool is based on predictive algorithms,” Sharon says. The company uses mathematics, system biology and bioinformatics to tell the clinician whether the patient will benefit from the treatment or not. 

“We do that with very good accuracy,” he says. 

PROphet is currently undergoing clinical trials in 40 locations in Europe, Israel and the US. A version of the test has also been made accessible to clinicians in the US.  The test does not require approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and those certifications that are required have been obtained.

The startup is not funded by any of the major pharmaceutical companies, which Sharon says are also involved in their own research in the field. 

“This is a private company sponsored by investors – venture capital investors and other investors,” he says. 

The next step, which the company has been working on for several years, is to use its understanding of the proteins found in the pathways to guide later treatment methods should the cancer progress, and even perhaps find specific treatments that block specific resistance mechanisms.  

This will ultimately mean creating a personalized treatment for each patient, based on the makeup of their blood and the proteins in it. 

“Clinicians don’t need a tool that will tell them to treat or not treat the patient,” Sharon says. “They need a tool that will tell them how to treat the patient.”

The post AI Tool Helps Doctors Pick Optimum Cancer Treatment For Patients   appeared first on NoCamels.

The disease is caused when tissue similar to that making up the lining of a woman’s uterus (the endometrium) grows in other areas, mainly in the pelvic region but occasionally also in other parts of the body. 

Endometrium tissue normally breaks down and leaves a woman’s body during her period. But if the tissue moves to a different part of the body, it has no way of being expelled and instead can cause permanent internal scarring. It can also be extremely painful during menstruation or even when going to the bathroom or having sexual intercourse.

The World Health Organization says that while it affects 1 in 10 women on the planet, treatments to alleviate the symptoms of endometriosis, such as medication or surgery, are not always effective and not always available to all sufferers due to location or socio-economic circumstances.  

But now Israeli femtech startup Gynica believes that it has a permanent solution to this devastating disease – cannabinoids, the main component in the cannabis plant. 

“[Endometriosis] is a disease that doesn’t have a cure,” Dr. Sari Prutchi-Sagiv, Gynica’s chief scientific officer, tells NoCamels. “There’s nothing out there and women really suffer.” 

Some women have even had a hysterectomy in an effort to ease the pain caused by endometrium tissue migrating to other areas of their reproductive system.

Research has shown that endocannabinoids – cannabis-like molecules found naturally in the body – play a great role in the female reproductive system. In fact, when a woman is pregnant or on her period, the female reproductive system has the most endocannabinoids of any part of the body.  

Harvard Medical School called the human endocannabinoid system “critical for almost every aspect of our moment-to-moment functioning,” controlling crucial functions such as sleep, learning, immune responses and even eating.  

The importance of endocannabinoids first led Gynica to research cannabinoid-based therapies for women’s health issues.

The privately funded company decided to focus on a treatment for endometriosis due to its common occurrence and extremely debilitating nature, Prutchi-Sagiv says. 

“Endometriosis is a very inflammatory disease because there’s a lot of macrophages in the reproductive system, which really cause a lot of pain, a lot of inflammation,” she explains, referring to a form of white blood cell found in the immune system that kills pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and even cancer cells.   

Cannabinoids, however, are known for their anti-inflammatory properties, and the company spent four years studying varying combinations of cannabinoids and macrophages to see the impact of the former on the latter. 

“We started using fractions and then isolates of these cannabinoids, trying to find the best solution for this problem,” Prutchi-Sagiv says. 

“We were working a lot with in vitro testing in order to see which are the best cannabinoids – which are the safe ones, which are the ones that we can use intravaginally, what would be the best formulation.”  

Not only do the cannabinoids reduce inflammation but they also deter the movement of the endometrium cells to different parts of the body. These two outcomes, together with the analgesic properties of cannabinoids, make the cannabinoid therapy a three-fold treatment that tackles different aspects of endometriosis. 

This led the researchers to create two different cannabinoid compounds – S-301 and S-302 – for which the company last month announced it will begin clinical trials in the near future. 

The treatments are administered using Gynia’s proprietary slow-release suppository, IntraVag, which was developed specifically for this therapy. 

The company is actually the first in the world to conduct clinical studies using cannabinoids as a treatment for endometriosis. There are existing treatments available using CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid found in cannabis plants, but Prutchi-Sagiv points out that they have not been clinically tested.  

The phase 1 trial for each compound will initially comprise 12 women, over a period of 14 days. If these phase 1 outcomes are as successful as hoped, the company will at once progress to phase 2 studies, a large trial involving more patients for some three months, with a month-long observation period immediately afterwards. 

The clinical trials will be conducted at Careggi University Hospital in Florence, which is the base of Prof. Felice Petraglia, the former president and co-founder of the Society for Endometriosis and Uterine Disorders (SEUD). 

Prutchi-Sagiv is extremely optimistic that the upcoming trials will prove that Gynica has created an effective cure for a disease that has caused misery and pain for tens of millions of women. 

“I really, really believe in cannabinoids,” she says. “Let me tell you, they really work.” 

The post Femtech Firm Aims To Cure Endometriosis With Cannabinoids appeared first on NoCamels.

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 CEO and co-founder Erez Shor tells NoCamels. 

And even if the surgery is uneventful and successful, he says, it is difficult to fully monitor the site of the operation for any post-surgical complications. 

“No one knows what’s going on in the healing process of the patient,” Shor says. 

Removal of part of the digestive tract involves severing the blood supply to that section, he explains. And when the tissue is reconnected afterwards, the blood supply is not immediately fully restored. 

This, combined with expected inflammation at the site of the operation, can lead to the tissue in the area becoming brittle and then perforated – posing a serious threat to the health of the patient. 

“The most prevalent problem in these surgeries is called anastomotic leak,” Shor explains (the actual process of rejoining the digestive tract after surgery is called anastomosis). 

“It can be a very small hole causing this leak, and this hole is usually the result of tissue being perforated,” he says. 

“All of a sudden, you have actual holes in the wall of the digestive tract and then you have a leak of fecal content into the abdominal cavity – and that’s when the catastrophe starts.” 

Diagnosing this occurrence in the early stages is extremely difficult as it is hard to see when the tissue is affected, he says.  

“People undergo the surgery and then need to stay in hospital for a few days just to verify that they’re okay,” he explains. “[But] if they’re not doing okay, in most cases they’re diagnosed when it’s already too late.” 

He explains that around 10 percent of patients who undergo digestive tract surgery develop this life-threatening complication, and up to 40 percent of those who do develop it do not survive. 

“This is a huge problem with substantial impact,” he says. 

Exero’s solution is xBar – a small, biocompatible sensor embedded temporarily at the surgical site. This sensor monitors healing and records any changes that could signify looming serious complications.  

“Unlike other potential solutions to this problem, we thought that if we were able to actually monitor processes, [we could] identify patients who are doing well versus patients who are not,” Shor explains. 

The xBar sensor is inserted alongside the standard surgical drain used in such operations. It monitors what Shor calls three “crucial” physiological processes: local inflammation, blood supply and the overall functioning of the digestive tract after surgery. The recorded data is sent to the cloud, where it is analyzed by Exero’s AI-powered platform, which in turn alerts the physicians should an issue be detected.  

With his background in neural interfaces, Shor says he realized it made sense to tap into what he calls the “control mechanism” of the digestive tract to monitor its functioning.

“[The sensor] interfaces with the neural control of the digestive tract,” Shor says. “And by reading the command signals of the organ, we’re able to infer whether the patient is doing well or not.” 

Identifying potential complications at an early enough stage means that any necessary intervention is less dangerous to the patient and results in a shorter stay in the intensive care unit, Shor says. 

Founded in 2018, the company is part of the Or Yehuda-based MEDX Xelerator, an incubator for medtech startups in Israel. And it was a conversation with MEDX CEO Shai Policker, an old university friend, that led Shor to the development of the sensor. 

Policker had posed the problem of early diagnosis of anastomotic leaks following GI surgery, with what Shor says was “a hint for a solution based on monitoring physiological processes.” 

Together with a surgeon at Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva, they hypothesized a solution that led to the creation of xBar, and Shor partially attributes their success to modern technology. 

“We have had the advantage of the recent developments in tech… comparing the state of affairs today to the state of affairs 20 years ago, with the availability of data-processing tools, computational power and AI,” he says. “Today, it’s available and it’s relatively cheap.” 

According to Shor, at least one other startup has developed a diagnostic device for GI surgery sites, but he says their method is less agile and more time consuming than the Exero sensor. 

The sensor has already successfully completed trials in large and small animals as well as ex vivo (removed from the body) tests of human tissue and two rounds of clinical trials with patients. 

Now, Exero is about to begin a pivotal third clinical trial in the US and Israel, and its successful completion is the key to receiving US Food and Drug Administration approval to market the sensor in the United States. 

At present, xBar has a breakthrough therapy designation from the FDA, which issued to therapies preliminary clinical evidence shows can treat serious or life-threatening conditions. The designation means that the device will be fast-tracked through the formal FDA approval process. 

Once that milestone has been reached, the company intends to develop sensors that can monitor other potential dangers from gastrointestinal procedures.  

“Monitoring for GI surgeries is a big deal,” Shor says. “The benefits we can provide, we’ll start with that.”   

The post Life-Saving Sensor Monitors Dangerous Fallout Of Stomach Surgery   appeared first on NoCamels.

NurExone Biologic Inc. developed ExoPTEN, which treats damage to the nervous system, from a concept created by two members of its Scientific Advisory Board: Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Prof. Daniel Offen from Tel Aviv University. 

(Another member of the board is Prof. Gabriel Zeilig, the head of the National Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Unit at Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest and globally renowned hospital.)

According to the World Health Organization, up to half a million people globally sustain a spinal cord injury every year, most from preventable causes such as road accidents or falls. 

Furthermore, the WHO says, people suffering from spinal injuries are up to five times more likely to die prematurely and are less likely to complete their education or find economic stability.  

The NurExone concept is two-fold: the medication’s active ingredient and its delivery via the nose. 

The two scientists spent many years working together on regeneration in spinal cord injuries using stem cells. Their breakthrough came, however, when they started using exosomes – nanoscopic particles released by cells to pass messages to one another, over both short and long distances. 

Crucially, these exosomes can penetrate through cell membranes and even the brain-blood barrier (BBB), a border made of cells that prevents almost all substances from entering or leaving the brain. 

Exosomes, NurExone CEO Lior Shaltiel tells NoCamels, are like mirror images of the cells that secrete them. So whether they are taken from bone marrow or umbilical cord (stem) cells, exosomes contain the same protein, RNA or DNA as their creators. 

NurExone decided that exosomes taken from bone marrow cells had the most potential to help regenerate cells affected by a spinal cord injury or traumatic brain injury. 

“The bone marrow – in our case – looked to be the best and the most potent exosomes,” Shaltiel explains. 

From there, the company added the active ingredient – a form of RNA known as siRNA, which prevents restrictions on the regeneration of cells, a key aspect of healing spinal cord injuries. 

The exosomes laden with the siRNA enter through the nose and are delivered to the injured areas of the spine, having passed through the brain blood barrier. 

These exosomes then communicate to healthy cells in the area to flock to the injured region in order to aid regeneration. 

“They want to help and assist damaged cells in damaged tissue,” Shaltiel explains. 

When the exosomes reach the damaged cells, they enter and dissolve, releasing the siRNA that then blocks the protein hampering regeneration at the injury site. 

One of the advantages of exosomes, Shaltiel says, is that they are suitable for everyone, with no adverse reactions being recorded in any individuals – which would require tailoring the therapy to different needs. 

“They’re very safe. You don’t see side effects, they have no immune response,” he explains. “This is a huge advantage operation-wise when trying to develop a new drug.”

When the treatment is underway, changes to the damaged area can be observed via MRI scans, which will display any regeneration and repair of the injured tissue.

The therapy has successfully been trialed in lab rats with acute spinal cord injury. The rats were administered the medication through the nose immediately after their injury for five consecutive days, followed by four days of rest, and then another five days of treatment. 

According to NurExone, 75 percent of the test cases permanently recovered at least some motor function, including being able to walk. 

“It’s there to stay,” Shaltiel says of the recovery. “It’s not going to become worse.”   

In October 2023, NurExone received orphan drug status (therapies that show promise in the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of rare diseases) from the US Food and Drug Administration. 

And despite still being far from ready for market, NurExone is already a publicly traded company, with shares on Canadian and German stock exchanges, alongside private investors. 

The Technion is one of those shareholders and earlier this month the company announced it was moving into a new state-of-the-art R&D facility on the campus.  

Shaltiel hopes to enter clinical trials for humans in the near future and the company is currently working on approval for this in North American hospitals, where the number of candidates is far larger than it is in Israel. 

He also hopes to enter into a “significant partnership” with a large biopharmaceutical company that would be interested in expanding into the field of exosomes as a treatment. 

“In the end,” he says, “we are the pioneers in this field.”

The post Nasal Therapy That Could Help People With Spinal Injuries Walk Again appeared first on NoCamels.

The SaliStick test is the creation of Jerusalem startup Salignostics, which has developed and is developing home diagnosis kits for a series of conditions, including COVID-19, malaria and streptococcal pharyngitis (strep throat). 

The method for each test is the same, but Salignostics decided to focus on its single-use pregnancy kit first, as it is one of the most common at-home tests on the market, the company’s deputy CEO Guy Krief tells NoCamels. 

Regardless of what the test is for, each kit includes two separate tubes – one that collects saliva and the other that has an active ingredient to do the testing. The two pieces, when fitted together, are approximately the size of a traditional pregnancy test. 

The user places the tube to collect the saliva, which has a cotton pad on the end, into their mouth. They then suck on the pad – usually for around one minute – until it has absorbed sufficient saliva and the color of the indicator under the pad changes from yellow to blue. 

Once the indicator has changed color, the tube is screwed into the slightly larger tester tube. The saliva then drips into the larger tube, which in the pregnancy test contains a check for a hormone only present in women expecting a baby.  

Like most other home pregnancy tests, the tube will show one line if the test is negative and two if it is positive. 

Results for the COVID test are also the same as other standard tests in which a second line appears if the person is infected. 

Krief says all of the tests are extremely easy to use, unlike the multi-stage COVID tests that were difficult for some people to carry out successfully.

“So many people misinterpreted the proper operation,” he says of the COVID test. 

The idea for Salignostics originally came from Prof. Aaron Palmon of the Hadassah School of Dental Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who brought together the other four co-founders – including Krief – who were all his PhD students and specializing in the study of saliva.  The researchers further were supported by Yissum, Hebrew University’s tech transfer company to facilitate taking the product from the lab to the market.

Drawing on their shared medical expertise, they decided that there had to be an easier way to diagnose certain conditions and set about trying to create it. 

“We thought back then that diagnostics must be more accessible, reliable, rapid and low cost,” Krief says. “And to get this, you have to go to the community level, to domestic use.”  

The idea they had was for a saliva-based rapid diagnostic test. Unlike blood, which is generally viewed as sterile, saliva is more exposed to disease due to its location. 

“Saliva is the gate to the body,” he says, as it contains viruses, bacteria and other pathogens.

Krief explains that saliva also contains large amounts of the protein salivary amylase, which the body uses to digest food, and they realized this could be used for many different diagnostics. 

The next challenge was to ensure that the test was as rapid and airtight as possible, as the properties of saliva change as it leaves the body, even after a short period of time. 

In the span of just two hours, saliva is a completely different fluid to the one inside the body, becoming more viscous and losing its high concentration of proteins. 

Adaptation & Evolution 

When the COVID pandemic erupted globally in early 2020, the team was working on the pregnancy test, Krief explains. They quickly realized that saliva could also be useful for testing for coronavirus and started working on SaliCov – a home test for COVID that even won the startup an award from the US National Institute of Health. 

And while Salignostics this month launched its pregnancy test in Israel, working together with the country’s biggest pharmacy chain Super Pharm, this is not the first location where the product was on the market. 

SaliSticks was first released in the UK, in the country’s second-largest drugstore chain Superdrug and leading supermarket Tesco. 

Once its product was on the Superdrug shelves, the startup surveyed the store’s female customers to see how many would be willing to use the new test. And according to Krief, 70 percent of the young women they asked said that they were open to using it.  

The UK launch was soon followed by one in Sweden, which Krief calls the company’s best market as Swedes are more willing to try innovative products. There, Salistick was introduced in every pharmacy in the country and even gynecologists started recommending it. 

“In a few months, SaliSticks has already sold over 100,000 units. So it’s encouraging,” Krief says. Around 840 million pregnancy tests are sold every year, according to Saligostics. 

And despite the growing sales, the company says it still needs funding from investors in order to keep improving the existing products and creating new diagnostic tests for different diseases. 

Currently, Salignostics is working on a test for strep throat, just in time for winter flu season.

Krief believes that in the near future, multiple types of tests will be conducted at home using saliva, providing diagnoses especially for people in countries that don’t have easy access to healthcare. 

He cites the example of HIV in Africa, where the World Health Organization says there are more than 25 million people living with the highly communicable disease.  

“What’s driving me is that the diagnostics may be much more accessible,” he says. 

“People in populations that suffer from lack of capabilities will not die or suffer because they hadn’t been diagnosed.”  

The post New Home Pregnancy Test Needs Saliva And No Bathrooms appeared first on NoCamels.

Sensifi, which was established in 2021, uses sensors to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by bacteria commonly found in foods, such as listeria, salmonella and E. coli. 

The tiny sensors – electrodes covered with carbon nanoparticles – can identify potentially dangerous bacteria in just an hour or two, depending on the levels of the microorganisms present in the food. This is far faster than the usual period of several days required by lab testing. 

“When bacteria grow on surfaces, they emit into the air various volatile organic compounds,” explains Prof. Raz Jelinek of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who developed the technology along with Sensifi CTO and PhD student Nitsan Shauloff. 

“The sensors can attract and bind the [VOCs] that are secreted by bacteria through the air when they grow,” he tells NoCamels. 

When the VOCs emitted by the bacteria bind to the sensors, they cause changes in the sensors’ capacitance (ability to hold an electrical charge) making the microorganisms observable. 

“We can detect even minute changes in the [sensors’] capacitance to be able to tell you that there are bacteria nearby,” Jelinek says. 

What is more, he adds, the different bacteria emit different variations of VOCs, making it possible to identify which pathogens are present in the food. This, explains Jelinek, is each bacterium’s “fingerprint.”  

The data about the bacteria would then be transmitted to an accompanying app on a mobile device, alerting to a contamination and pinpointing the culprit. 

Using machine learning, the startup taught the sensors to spot the most common bacteria that cause food to be unsafe, including salmonella (frequently found in badly prepared poultry and eggs) and listeria (often linked to cheese and raw produce). In fact, listeria fears have led to multiple warnings about lettuce in the US. 

“Obviously, there’s thousands of bacteria out there, and you cannot really teach the sensor all these bacteria,” Jelinek says. “But when you talk about food contamination, usually there are the usual suspects.”  

Illness due to foodborne disease poses significant challenges worldwide. There are around 600 global million cases of illness and some 420,000 deaths due to  foodborne diseases every year, according to the World Health Organisation. What is more, around 30 percent of the deaths caused by unsafe food occur among children under the age of five years.  

For now, Jelinek says, the sensors are being designed for the food industry, in locations such as factories and processing plants. 

He gives the example of Israeli food giant Strauss, whose plant near Haifa several years ago tested positive for salmonella. Every item made in the factory had to be recalled, including products sent to the US, Europe and Australia. 

“One advantage of our sensors is that they are extremely cheap, so you can distribute tens or hundreds of sensors in strategic locations,” Jelinek explains. 

“Each sensor is going to transmit signals to the app and you can see where exactly you have a risk of contamination,” he says. “If you’re a food company, you’re going to have sensors in your product facility, you’re going to have sensors in your storage area,” he says. 

Even so, Sensifi CEO Modi Peled told the media last year that technology could be extended to other fields, including determining which bacteria is present in a patient’s body in order to decide on a specific course of antibiotics or even ensuring that yeast used in brewing beer is of an acceptable standard. 

The startup has proven its electronic nose’s viability in lab tests, and is now creating a prototype that can be used by companies. It has received funding from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to promoting the high-tech sector,  and entrepreneurial support from Ben-Gurion University’s startup accelerator program Oazis. 

The prototype will be ready in the coming months, and, according to Jelinek, will be a unique product. 

“There are no ‘noses’ for monitoring bacteria in the food industry,” he says. “Very very few electronic noses monitor bacteria at all. Many of them are too expensive or too complex in terms of the detection mechanisms. So we believe that we have intrinsic advantages for our technology.” 

The post Artificial Nose Sniffs Out The Bacteria Making Your Food Go Bad appeared first on NoCamels.

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder causing frequent seizures that temporarily disrupt brain function. There are many different types of seizures, each one with a range of symptoms, including uncontrollable jerking (commonly known as a fit) and loss of awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.

The chronic, non-communicable disease can be found in people of all ages, and, according to the World Health Organisation, it affects some 50 million people worldwide. 

Be’er Sheva-headquartered NeuroHelp was founded three years ago, when its CTO Oren Shriki, a professor in the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, partnered with CEO Nadav Karni to figure out a way to potentially detect even the smallest seizure in patients. 

Shriki began with the hypothesis that everyone – even those without epilepsy – operates on the verge of a seizure, and sought to find a way that could detect what he calls the “transition point,” after which a seizure is inevitable. 

“If you cross this transition point, you may end up having a hallucination, which is some sort of uncontrolled activity in the brain, or epileptic seizures, which are kind of similar but involve more synchronous [simultaneous] activity of the neural networks,” he tells NoCamels. 

Neurohelp created AI-led software that could help detect seizures using electroencephalography (EEG) tests.

An EEG measures electrical activity in the brain with small, metal discs that attach to the scalp. The software the company developed can detect certain measurable fluctuations in brain activity that indicate that a seizure is taking place. 

Once the algorithm was able to detect a seizure through monitoring brainwaves, NeuroHelp started work on a way to predict seizures about an hour before they happened. To do so, they took all the brain activity and ran it through the algorithm to identify what brain activity to expect before an epileptic seizure. 

The platform currently uses an EEG scanner that can record and monitor brian activity at night via a mobile app, but is working on a “more compact” device that can be worn during the day. 

Every few seconds, the NeuroHelp app gets a rating from the ongoing EEG test that tells the AI how close to passing the transition point a patient is. This shows a person if a seizure could soon occur. 

Once a seizure is predicted, Shriki first recommends not to do any kind of “risky” activities, such as swimming or attending a public event. The second thing he recommends is to take emergency medication meant to stop seizures. 

Because seizures come in clusters, the medication is usually taken to stop the first one and then prevent any others that may follow. However, Shriki explains that taking the medication before the first seizure could prevent all subsequent ones from happening at all. 

“The assumption is that if you predict a seizure in advance, even ten to five minutes before, it’s enough to take this kind of medication,” Shriki says.

“We believe that if you take [the medication] even within a timeframe of one hour or 30 minutes before seizure, it will still work.”

He also emphasizes the importance of not constantly taking emergency medication because the brain can adapt to the medication and stop it from its intended purpose. 

“These are medications that you should use only when those are concrete alert,” Shriki says. 

Furthermore, there are many people for whom medication to prevent seizures is ineffective. 

“About a third of patients do not react to drugs. They are considered treatment resistant and they keep suffering from seizures,” says Karni.

Detection of an imminent seizure, Shriki says, is not as straightforward as one might think. Some signs are very clear, but many are much more subtle. And in many instances, movements like eye blinks can seem like a seizure even when they are not. 

Using the EEG readings, Shriki and his team also worked on creating an algorithm that learnt what fake seizures look like, thereby ruling out any false alarms. 

“Initially, the algorithms had 10 to 20 false alarms per day. Currently there are around one 0.2 false alarms per day, which means one to two false alarms per week,” says Shriki. 

NeuroHelp is funded by venture capitalists in the healthcare industry as well as receiving funding from Oazis, Ben-Gurion University’s accelerator program. 

Shriki is now developing a system called Neurofeedback, which can provide a patient with information about their brain and train it to stay away from the point of transition. 

NeuroHelp is now holding a further set of clinical trials for the seizure detector, and Karni believes that by next year it will be available to consumers for home use. 

Based on the assumption that everyone can be on the verge of a seizure, whether they have been diagnosed or not, Shriki hopes the system will be of widespread use. 

“We believe we can change the world,” he says. “There is a long way to go, but we’re working on it.” 

The post Predicting Epileptic Seizures An Hour Before They Happen  appeared first on NoCamels.

One of the companies supplying gummies to the global wellness domain is TopGum, an Israeli manufacturer with a catalog of nutraceutical-enriched gummies constantly being updated with new flavors to meet demand of the growing market.

TopGum has vast knowledge in how to design palatable gummies. In 2004, they started in confectionery. Like other Israeli confectioners aligning their products with Jewish dietary laws, the companies making jelly candies or gummies develop recipes that do not contain animal-based gelatin or collagen. By default, these kosher gummies are vegan-friendly, halal certified and healthier, too.  

While TopGum’s gummy candy production was successful, five years ago, the company chose to join the nutraceutical market, where they felt they could make a bigger impact.

For starters, they had taste on their side. 

“We know how to make tasty gummies,” Menahem Alexander, Marketing Director at TopGum tells NoCamels.

“So, when we decided to [switch from confectionery to nutraceuticals], we started with a tasty base. This is why our company slogan is, ‘the proof is in the taste,’ because we start with the best taste that we can offer and from there make the gummies as healthy as possible.” 

On the one hand, gummies are an important vitamin delivery system. On the other hand, gummies are often very high in sugar.  

“In general, the gummies you can find in the market are sugar based and then add active ingredients,” says Alexander. “At TopGum, we have a patent our premium gummies called Gummiceuticals, which are based on prebiotic fiber vegan, are sugar-free or no-added sugar, and fully customizable in terms of formulation, matrix, flavor, shape and color.” 

These Gummiceutical dietary prebiotic fiber nutraceutical gummies, which use no added sugars, meet the standards to be labeled as “sugar free” in the US. 

Less Sugar, Still Tasty

TopGum’s expertise at cutting back on sugar in its gummies makes sense. It is something Israeli food-tech companies have become known for — innovative techniques to cut back on sugar in different areas of the nutraceutical and new foods arenas.

Another Israeli company in the gummies space is Capsoil. Like TopGum, it too develops innovative functional gummies that are formulated to keep undesirable ingredients, such as sugar, out of the makeup. 

Similarly, DouxMatok, a food-tech company and the developer of the Incredo Sugar sugar reduction solution, has a partnership with Better Nutritionals, an R&D leader in nutritional supplements in the gummy category, on sugar-reduced, pectin-based gummies. 

There’s also Better Juice, the Israeli startup using technology to reduce the sugar content in fruit juices. They recently partnered with global company Ingredion to penetrate the North American market with their reduced sugar juices.

And Ambrosia Bio, which turns common sugars into allulose, partnered last year with Ginkgo Bioworks, one of America’s biggest biotech companies, to develop low-calorie sugar for healthier food production.

All Shapes And Sizes 

The gummies come in many different shapes with the most common shapes being bears and gumdrops, with a smooth texture that is easy to consume. Alexander emphasizes that taste is very important – and TopGum keeps its gummies tasting fruity.

The company offers two product options: companies can select already made gummies from the catalog, or customize the shape, color, flavor and texture of gummies in a longer manufacturing process that can take up to six months to deliver. 

One of these pre-made gummies is the Gummiccino, coffee flavored  gummies shaped like espresso pods and launched in early 2023.  In Q4 of last year, TopGum introduced their latest gummy, the Multimineral Cube. Part of their Gummiceuticals line, those gummies come in three formulas: calcium and magnesium, full-spectrum, and high-dose calcium.  

“With our proprietary micro-encapsulation TopCaps technology, we offer the highest dosage of active ingredient per gummy and offer new gummies using very challenging ingredients,” says Alexander. 

In August 2022, TopGum became a USDA-certified organic manufacturer of gummies.

“Receiving formal organic certification entails a lengthy and complex process and marks an important milestone for us,” Doron Delouya, VP of Product at TopGum, said at the time.

Most of the gummies rolling out of the Israeli manufacturing plant, however, are branded under different names. TopGum is a white label company that sells to distributors and manufacturers in South America, North America, Europe, Australia and beyond.  

While there are many gummies manufacturers worldwide, Alexander has no qualms about saying that TopGum’s gummies have “the quality of our gummies is one of the best,” he says, referring to TopGum’s sugar-free, pectin-based formulation and proprietary science-backed preparation process.

Indeed, TopGum has won accolades from industry experts in the nutraceutical sector. Last year, the company won second place in the Best Tasting Functional Food competition at the international Vitafoods Europe nutraceutical trade show. In 2022, the company took home first place for Best Functional Food of their high-dosage Vitamin C gummies at the same event. 

In October, TopGum launched its new line of high-dose multimineral fiber-based and sugar-free Gummiceuticals at the SupplySide West nutraceutical event in Las Vegas. Natural Products Insider tapped the company’s gummies as one of the top 12 best products at the trade show.

But perhaps even more touching than that honor was the support and encouragement given to company representatives at the event that was taking place just two weeks after war broke out between Israel and Hamas. Alexander tells NoCamels that TopGum had shut down its manufacturing plant when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, noting that the company’s factory is in the southern city of Sderot, one of the main points to have been attacked. Five days after war broke out, the factory opened its doors in a mark of resilience.  And two weeks into the war, the company representatives went to Las Vegas with their new product. 

“The show must go on,” Alexander says. “We must continue.”

TopGum has an existing production plant in Sderot, about an 1.5 hours south of Tel Aviv. The company is also building a $30 million second production plant to meet rising demand for its products. 

The post Israeli Company Creates Customizable Gummy Supplements appeared first on NoCamels.

From cameras in smartphones to smartwatch sensors to microphones in tablets, a growing number of tech companies are developing and repurposing our everyday digital devices to be used as diagnostic tools to better monitor and improve our health.

Binah.ai, the Ramat Gan-based health and wellness check software provider, hit the headlines twice in the last six weeks for its software solution that is changing – and will change — how we monitor personal wellbeing.

The company uses artificial intelligence (AI) and sensors to monitor individuals’ vital signs and biomarkers remotely. 

“The core focus of Binah is [to provide] the most basic ability of a basic observation. [While in Israel] we live in a very advanced world in terms of medical services – 2.9 doctors for 1,000 people — there are countries in which people still need to drive eight hours in order to see a physician. So, even though telemedicine has been exploding in the past few years, it is still almost impossible to deliver multiple types of medical devices and multiple types of lab work in order to get the basic observation. And that is what we’ve created at Binah,” co-founder and CEO David Maman tells NoCamels.

Binah.ai was founded in 2016 by Maman, Konstantin Gedalin, and Michael Markzon. With over $30 million in investments to date, the company is carving a name for itself in the health monitoring sector. It is not a technology meant to replace doctors, says Maman. Rather, Binah.ai’s technology uses a combination of signal processing, AI and photoplethysmography (PPG) – a non-invasive technology that uses a light source and a photodetector at the surface of skin to measure changes to the blood – to provide vital signs measurements with medical-grade accuracy through the use of our everyday digital devices — smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

Indeed, our devices have been turned into health and wellbeing tools alongside their everyday uses. Our smartwatches can check our oxygen saturation, our phones can help us track our heart rate, and measure stress, sleep quality and a whole range of other health indicators.

Binah’s technology can measure multiple types of biomarkers. To name a few, the company can monitor heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, heart rate variability, and even hemoglobin levels. All it requires is one 40-second selfie. Maman says his company is constantly adding new types of biomarkers. And noted that Binah’s technology can identify these biomarkers regardless of skin tone, age, sex, or ethnicity. 

Maman says there are 20-or-so companies working in this space — using cameras built into our devices to continuously monitor our health. What sets Binah apart is that the company’s business model is to license its pioneering technology and let other companies bring it to market. Binah, which in Hebrew translates to ‘wisdom’ or ‘intelligence’, enables anyone to measure a wide range of biomarkers and apply it to a specific solution.

Binah.ai’s technology does not record or keep track of information of its users. It is up to the company that integrates the solution to decide what information it shares with its users. 

Health data in other sectors

“When we think about healthcare, we usually think about pure healthcare services. Like a clinic, hospitals, and maybe, remote care. But health data has become a commodity. Organizations need health data to make better decisions,” says Maman, referring to some of the collaborations his company has with global entities.

Such as the strategic partnership with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT East). The companies joined forces in January to advance employee safety and health management in the manufacturing and construction sector. Their joint goal is to ease monitoring employee health and safety and provide peace of mind.  

Earlier this month, Binah announced a partnership with Sapiens to improve risk management in the insurance sector.

“Binah.ai’s groundbreaking health monitoring technology is a game-changer in our insurance solutions,” Amanda Ingram, Sapiens Proposition & Ecosystem Manager, said in a press statement. Her company offers a cloud-based SaaS insurance platform that empowers insurers to innovate and adopt digital solutions.

The insurance and construction sectors are just two examples of where Maman envisions Binah making an impact.

“This technology will be embedded in everything. From nutrition to home appliances to cars to insurance, our goal is to make this tech available for endless use cases. Binah will be running on 500 million devices,” Maman tells NoCamels. “We’re providing the ability to help people.”

The post Israeli Startup Can Check Your Health With 40-Second Selfie appeared first on NoCamels.

Despite dutifully tracking his treatment herself, Cohen realized that noting down his vitals in a binder full of papers was not helping her understand his condition or manage his medical records. 

Many others in a similar situation, she realized, were also tracking the vital signs of sick loved ones. But without a doctor at hand, it was hard to know what could help or hinder the condition. 

Cohen came to the conclusion that such people needed a tool to not only track vital signs, but also provide information about the illness and tips that could help to improve their well-being.

And so she founded and became the CEO of Hello Heart, a heart health app for your phone designed to give people the kind of information that she herself had really wanted, but simply could not have. 

Every member of the company either has a heart condition themselves or a loved one with a heart condition, ensuring that they all share the mission to improve heart health. 

The AI-based app can help manage conditions, record what medication a person is taking and when, and also integrate health and healthy living platforms like the step counter on an iOS device. 

With permission, the platform can connect to providers of important medical information from clinics, hospitals and labs, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels and chronic disorders. This allows the app to perform a comprehensive analysis of a user’s medical history and needs. 

With offices in California and New York as well its Tel Aviv base, Hello Heart for now is in the US market alone. Around 100 American healthcare companies are already using the app, and, says Hello Heart CTO Michal Gutman, venture capital investors are also helping the company stay afloat. 

The company works with multiple makers of FDA-approved blood pressure monitors as part of a user’s health insurance plan. These devices can then connect to the Hello Heart application via Bluetooth. 

“You need to track your blood pressure as prescribed by your physician, and every time you do that the information will just flow seamlessly to the app,” Gutman tells NoCamels. 

Hello Heart even provides digital coaching and encourages small behavioral changes to lead to a healthier lifestyle. Every recommendation or piece of advice from the company is vetted by its medical team in order to ensure it is of the highest standards and safety. 

And those small changes, says Gutman, are simple and easy tips that are not too hard for a user to manage, having an effect without pressuring the user too much to undergo extreme habit changes.

The app has two types of coaching. The first is static, providing tips and tricks to improving heart health that are more general and can help everyone. 

The second is dynamic: Hello Heart adapts the tips it provides to each user, based on an AI analysis of personal data such as medication, exercise regimen, height and weight.

“We take small baby steps,” Gutman says. “We don’t tell you to start exercising, instead we will tell you the next time that you’re going to the shopping mall, just park your car further away in the parking lot so you would get those five minutes of walking.”

What’s more, the AI learns which interactions and tips the user responds to, and then improves its suggestions in line with those preferences.  

All of the Hello Heart tips use scientific studies to understand how best to help a user in ways that do not involve medication. This can include better eating habits or workouts – or even suggestions that would have never occurred to some:  

“[We have] tips on everything that relates to help, we even have tips about the fact that sleeping in a room with plants also can improve your heart health,” says Gutman.

Women’s health is one of the main Hello Heart focuses, according to Gutman. The woman-led company understands that the most common symptoms of heart attacks for females are different than for males, she says, adding that many women do not think their symptoms are heart-related but rather believe them to be merely stress or anxiety. 

“Our goal is just to prevent the next heart attack,” she says. 

The post App Helps Track Your Heart Health From The Comfort  Of Your Phone   appeared first on NoCamels.

The bile duct is a tube-like structure that carries bile from the liver, where it is produced, to the small intestine, where it is used to help digest food.   

Any treatment of issues within the bile duct, such as bile stones or other blockages, requires insertion of an endoscope – a tiny camera attached to a guidewire – during a procedure called endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP). 

This allows doctors to examine the area through imaging and involves inserting the guidewire through the mouth down into the duodenum – the first section of the small intestine – and then into the bile duct. 

But the passage leading from the duodenum to the bile duct, known as the ampulla of Vater, also leads to the pancreatic duct. 

And according to Samer Abboud, the CEO of medtech startup Swift Duct, the fact that the two ducts share the same entrance from the duodenum complicates an ERCP in around 1 in 5 patients. 

“The whole process is done blindly without [the doctor] seeing what’s happening or where he or she is navigating,”  Abboud tells NoCamels. 

This means the guidewire can be inadvertently directed into the pancreatic duct, potentially leading to accidental damage, post-procedure complication and, in extreme cases, even fatality. 

“The doctor may end up unintentionally in the pancreatic duct or bumping against the wall trying to successfully cannulate [insert a medical device into a body cavity] the bile duct. This increases the risk of pancreatitis, which is a pancreatic inflammation that we want to prevent,” says Abboud. 

He explains that such cases can have a “severe impact” on the patient, causing a great deal of pain and often leading to a lengthy hospital stay, which also has financial and personnel implications for the healthcare system.  

Swift Duct has devised a method of differentiating between the fluids produced respectively in the bile and pancreatic ducts, which ensures that the endoscope enters the former and avoids the latter. 

 “The fluids have different properties,” explains Abboud. “They have different colors, different viscosity and different electrical properties.” 

It is these electrical properties that Swift Duct uses to direct the endoscope to the right destination. 

“We insert a wire, but instead of a passive wire, our wire includes sensors that can analyze the electrical properties of the fluids,” Abboud explains. 

“And through this analysis, we indicate to the doctor where he or she is,” he says. 

“If the doctor is getting closer to the dangerous area, we give alerts: ‘you’re getting into the dangerous zone.’ But if the doctor is getting into the safe duct, we say: ‘okay, go ahead.’” 

The Swift Duct solution comprises two elements – the sensor that detects the differences between the bile duct and pancreatic duct fluids and a flexible guidewire that Abboud says allows doctors to move easily into the correct duct.  

Once inside the ampulla of Vater, the sensor extends from the guidewire and into the duct, where it analyzes the fluid to determine whether it is in the correct place. 

Together, he explains, the sensor and guidewire function as a kind of Google Maps for the small intestine.  

“We do the whole procedure faster than usual because there is lots of trial and error involved in pushing against the walls, [which] not only increases the risk for pancreatitis but also prolongs the procedure,” he says. 

So not only does the Swift Duct method reduce the time a patient is sedated and undergoing the procedure, according to Abboud, but it also allows physicians more time to attend to other patients. 

It is, he says, an entirely original solution for which Swift Duct holds the patent. 

The company was created in 2020 and today works with MEDX Xelerator, a medtech incubator and investor functioning with the support of the Israel Innovation Authority – a branch of the government dedicated to promoting the country’s high-tech sector. 

Its founders – whom Abboud describes as “an engineer, a doctor and a business administrator” – created the endoscopic technology as part of a project they were assigned while attending a course on the development of medical devices.  

The three interviewed a doctor who pointed out the need to improve the ERCP procedure, which they decided to make the focus of their project. 

This led the trio to a meeting with a representative of Boston Scientific, a multinational producer of medical devices that works closely with MEDX, who facilitated a meeting at the incubator. 

Both the IIA and Boston Scientific have since invested in the company, which is headquartered at MEDX’s northern Israel base in Sakhnin.  

So far, Swift Duct has successfully completed its proof of concept and animal testing stages and is now conducting human clinical trials at three hospitals in Israel. 

Trials at one of the three, Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, have almost completely halted as the northern city is located just a few kilometers from the Lebanese border and presently considered unsafe due to the fighting with the Hezbollah terror group. 

As a result, the trials are primarily taking place at Rambam Healthcare Campus in Haifa and world-renowned Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, the biggest hospital both in Israel and the entire Middle East. 

Abboud expects that the two devices will be ready for market in the first half of 2026. 

“We had lots of ideas at the beginning,” he says. “But we ended up with a very simple solution.”  

The post Unique Sensor Offers Safe Solution For Tricky Intestinal Procedure appeared first on NoCamels.

Having experienced the disorder firsthand, the creator and CEO of Pery, Ziv Elul, realized that many parents of children with ADHD do not have the correct tools to deal with the diagnosis, and in many cases, they too had undiagnosed ADHD. 

Elul, a veteran businessman, was himself diagnosed with the condition as an adult, at around the same time as all of his children.

Extensive research shows that the condition is indeed genetic, and a child with a parent with ADHD has a greater than 50 percent chance of having it too. 

According to the organization Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD), around 129 million children and adolescents worldwide between the ages of 5 to 19 years have ADHD. The US National Library of Medicine says that some 366 million adults worldwide also have the condition. 

The app, Elul realized, would have to take into account the needs of people with ADHD, using short interactions and simple instructions.

New users are invited to complete a brief questionnaire about themselves and their children, including specific behaviors, daily routines, particular obstacles, performance at school and emotional responses.  

This part, Elul explains, was created to be a dialogue between the AI platform and the new user. 

To create the optimal interaction between user and interface, the company worked with psychiatrists and psychologists at hospitals in the US as well as psychologists working in its own offices in Tel Aviv. 

“We want validated clinical knowledge when we come with any recommendation,” Elul tells NoCamels. 

After completing the questionnaire, the AI system analyzes the core function impairments and behavior of the family members involved, using clinical studies collated by the company. 

The app then offers help with living with the condition, such as parenting strategies, behavior management and even communication with the child’s school. 

Each family receives a personalized strategy that will give them the best chance of having a successful daily routine. This, Elul says, is meant to help children most of all learn that living with ADHD is not an impediment. 

At the end of each day, the app asks users questions about how helpful they found the daily insights provided. When something does not work for the users for a period of several days, the AI adapts the planned routine accordingly. 

“You need a map to guide you, there is not only one way and it depends on you and depends on your targets,” Elul says. 

Elul co-founded Pery with COO Gili Avital-Lang and CTO Meir Amsellem, who also have children with ADHD. All three were driven by a personal desire to help people – young and adult – with the condition have an easier day-to-day life. 

In fact, all 16 members of the Pery team either have the condition or children who do. And according to Elul, the company sought this out as they wanted to work with people who truly understood what it is like living with and around ADHD. 

“[We are a] team with a mission to do something that will change the world of parenting and to bring AI technology to mental health,” Elul says. 

The app is also designed to support relevant documentation, and can store all important medical information in folders that can then be used to send diagnoses to key institutions such as schools or workplaces. 

Pery launched this month, after half a year of working with specialist clinics to understand the best ways to help children with ADHD. 

For Elul, it was important that the whole platform was rooted in both scientific understanding and personal knowledge, combined with the possibilities afforded by AI. 

The company’s name comes from the Hebrew word pe’er, meaning magnificence. According to Elul, this is because the company is trying to see the splendor and positives in everyday problems. 

The company is currently funded by two different VCs, along with investment from CEOs of other startups who wished to support the concept. 

The next step, Elul says, is a funding round based on a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE), in which investors expect to receive shares in the company in the future. 

Pery is also planning to become a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) company, in which they will partner with other firms in order to then reach more new users. 

Elul is further hoping to add a simulation to the app that will teach parents how to talk to their children to inspire positive conversations and actions.

“There is a mission and there is a soul,” he says. “We want to leverage this technology to really help parents.”

The post New App Is Digital Ally For Parents And Children with ADHD appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli biotechnology startup says it has developed a way to turn the disease into a chronic disorder, using novel technology to target solid tumors with heat in order to destroy them. 

The New Phase platform, called the Sarah Nanotechnology System, builds on existing research that found that cancer tissue is extremely sensitive to heat and that the tumors need a variety of different nutrients, especially glucose, to grow. The company then devised a way to develop nanoparticles that heat up to around 50 degrees Celsius, which when introduced to the cancer tissue causes it to die off. 

The nanoparticles are introduced into the patient’s body via intravenous injection (IV). 

The nanoparticles travel through the bloodstream and access the tumors by entering through thin blood vessels, known as capillaries. The cancer cells grow these capillaries around themselves in order to draw the oxygen and nutrients from the body that they need to reproduce. 

When these blood vessels are not fully developed, the nanoparticles can use them to amass on the tissues around the cancer cells.

The nanoparticles themselves are made from a phase change material – a wax-like material that absorbs more energy and can maintain the same predefined temperature of 40-50 degrees Celsius to heat the tumors. The nanoparticles get this energy from an electromagnetic field that heats up the nanoparticles to the pre-defined temperature of 50 C. 

To keep the patient safe during each treatment session, which lasts for approximately 30 minutes, they are also placed under a cooling blanket, accompanied by constant monitoring using temperature sensors to ensure a regulated environment. 

During this time, the nanoparticles accumulate around the cancer cells, subsequently heating and eliminating the malignant tissue while preserving surrounding healthy tissue.

“We heat up the tissue to 50 degrees Celsius [and] no damage will happen to the normal cells and they will survive because they have the ability to survive even 55 and 60 degrees,” Ofer Shalev, CEO and founder member of New Phase, tells NoCamels. 

He stresses that it is important to understand that this procedure doesn’t aim to eradicate cancer.  Instead, the treatment transitions the disease from a terminal condition to a chronic one.

“[We aim to] reduce the metastatic mass and that’s how you can prolong the life of a patient,” Shalev says. 

The idea for these nanoparticles came about 13 years ago, according to Shalev, after the mother of New Phase co-founder Dr. Rafi Hoff was diagnosed with lung cancer. 

The two, who had worked together on a previous medtech company, united to develop a new tool to tackle the disease. Hoff’s mother was named Sarah, which later became the title of the treatment they developed. 

The company is privately funded and has raised around $35 million without backing from external venture capitalists, and only from private investors and family, although Shalev says they anticipate such investment from VCs or strategic investors in the near future. 

While other biotech firms have developed treatments based on changing the temperature of a tumor, most notably freezing them, Shalev believes that the nanoparticle therapy they have devised is a game changer as it offers systemic and not local treatment. 

“I do think that it’s going to be a breakthrough solution,” he tells NoCamels. 

The system has almost completed a phase one clinical trial at Rabin Medical Center (Beilinson Hospital) in central Israel. The trial involved 17 patients with stage four cancer of different forms, who had exhausted all other forms of treatment. 

The study, which was approved by the Israeli Ministry of Health, focused on safety and toxicity. 

As the treatment is not a one-time solution, patients underwent four or more sessions, with some even being treated for six to 12 months.

While the treatment was administered to patients with various forms of cancer, such as liver, cervical and colon, the company decided to not deal with brain tumors as the brain reacts differently to heat than other parts of the body. 

Shalev explains that while the heat treatment kills off cancer cells, it does not completely eradicate the solid tumors. The goal, he reiterates, is to make cancer into a chronic disease and not a fatal one, as was achieved with AIDS in the late 1990s. 

The trial found that the treatment killed enough of the cancer in seven of the patients for them to again be eligible for other therapies. 

“They were designated after the treatment as [having a] stable disease,” Shalev says. 

Sarah Nanoparticles is already IDE-approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which allows the company to conduct clinical trials in American institutions. In fact, New Phase is currently in contact with hospitals in the United States about starting the feasibility study there. 

New Phase is working to get approval in Israel for the next stage, which is a pivotal trial that will be conducted in multiple hospitals.  

“We are not going to cure cancer,” Shalev says. 

“We are going to change cancer into a manageable or chronic disease that people can live with, without side effects.”

The post New Heat Therapy Aims To Turn Cancer From Fatal To Chronic appeared first on NoCamels.

And for farmers whose businesses depend on these egg layers, the inevitable male chicks that are hatched – roughly seven billion every year – do not have a fiscal benefit and are killed immediately. 

Israeli startup Huminn Poultry has developed a gene that stops embryos from developing into male baby chicks when the eggs are exposed to a simple blue LED light.

The gene was introduced to a group of chickens that the company dubbed the “Golda line.” Their eggs, which also include the gene, are incubated under a regular blue LED light for 21 days until they hatch.

By day three of the 21-day development, however, when the embryos inside the eggs begin to determine their sex – and while they are still just bundles of cells – the light triggers the gene to stop all further development of eggs containing male embryos. 

The female eggs, on the other hand, go on to hatch and lay their own eggs. 

A complementary technology identifies the undeveloped eggs that are subsequently removed from the incubator.

These undeveloped eggs are essentially pure protein that can potentially be used for animal feed and need not go to waste, says Eli Mor, president and co-founder of Huminn Poultry. 

“We have hundreds of eggs that have been exposed to the blue light, and to date, not a single male chick has hatched,” Mor tells NoCamels.

He believes that if integrated into the DNA of the chicken breeds used by the world’s biggest breeders, the gene can prevent over 90 percent of all male chicks from being culled at birth. 

“This phenomenon, I would say, is the most horrible and devastating in terms of animal welfare,” says Mor. 

The startup is a subsidiary of Huminn, an Israeli company that uses gene editing to solve healthcare, nutrition and sustainability challenges. It believes that aside from avoiding a grisly fate for baby male chicks, its solution can also save a lot of money, time and labor.  

Chicken eggs need to spend three weeks incubating, and it is only when they hatch that egg producers can actually determine their gender. To do so, they must manually sort the chicks – usually by gently examining the length of their wing feathers. 

The cost of culling each male chick is a single dollar, but with nearly eight billion hatching each year, the cost rises to match the inhumane way in which they are killed.

Mor explains that male chicks that are killed cannot be used as a food source instead as they are of a different breed to chickens raised for poultry.

“These are completely different birds,” he says. “[Egg layers] are very efficient, smaller and eat less. All the DNA is focused on bringing them to lay more eggs per year.”

The culling of male chicks is an industry-wide problem, and several sexing solutions have already been developed to prevent it, in addition to the gene modification created by Huminn Poultry. 

One solution is to look inside the egg while the chick is still developing. 

The technologies involved in this process include an MRI, which uses a magnetic field and radio waves to take pictures inside of the egg, and extracting liquid from the egg and analyzing it to determine the sex.

But Mor explains that farmers can only make out the sex of the chick on day 13 of an egg’s incubation – and by the time its sex can be determined, the assumption is that it can already feel pain. 

“Even if [these technologies] can identify that there is a male in the egg, they still need to get rid of it,” says Mor. “This would cause the little creature inside to suffer.”

Other methods include the one devised by Israeli startup Soos, which uses soundwaves while the chicks are incubating to increase the likelihood of ovary development among male chicks by 50 to 80 percent.

Even so, Mor says that the Huminn Poultry gene is the most viable and accurate solution to the culling of male baby chicks.

The technology was developed by Dr. Yuval Cinnamon, embryology specialist at the Volcani Institute, Israel’s national agricultural research center.

“He thought that the best solution was to prevent the male chicks from ever being developed,” says Mor. 

Huminn Poultry, based in Rehovot, says it will take several years to fully integrate its gene into an entire breed of chickens.

Nonetheless, he believes that the solution will be integrated by at least one breeding company within the next few years.

“We don’t require any sophisticated systems or technicians to alter the equipment of [egg producers],” says Mor.

“The beauty of the solution is that once it’s done, it’s done,” he says. “It won’t need to be integrated again into the same chicken breed.”

The post Gene Alteration Platform Cuts Cruel Culling Of Male Chicks appeared first on NoCamels.

Helios was created in 2018 with the initial goal of producing oxygen on the moon so that spacecraft transporting items to the lunar surface would be able to travel more lightly and without the oxygen-heavy fuel needed to return to Earth. 

The plan was to extract the oxygen from ore on the lunar surface through a chemical process, but they quickly realized that the carbon they needed was not found on the moon.  

For hundreds of years, humans have used fossil fuels such as carbon to heat ore in order to extract iron, copper or other metals and minerals. This process, known as smelting, creates a chemical reaction that separates the metals or minerals from oxygen that binds them to the ore. 

Without the availability of naturally occurring sources of carbon, the team went back to the drawing board. At this point, they found an unlikely but abundant source of fuel on the moon that none have thought to use before: sodium. 

“We literally opened the periodic table and tried to figure out what other elements we could try,” Jonathan Geifman, co-founder and CEO of Helios, tells NoCamels. 

“What immediately popped out to our chemical experts was the first column in the periodic table: the alkali metals.” 

The startup also realized that burning sodium had the potential to address a pressing environmental issue down here on Earth, namely the copious amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted during smelting.

Geifman says that the team decided to start with the production of steel – the iron and carbon blend responsible for a sizable proportion of our carbon footprint. 

“This is the one metal [alloy] that humanity produces the most – 10 times more than all of the other metals combined,” he says. Every ton of steel produced, he explains, also emits two tons of CO2. 

The startup says that its sodium-based method of producing steel can cut energy use by half and eliminate direct carbon emissions entirely. 

“Our whole process requires less energy in comparison to how steel is produced today,” says Geifman.

This is because the sodium used in Helios’ proprietary hardware only needs to be heated to 400°C (752°F) in order to separate the oxygen from iron in the ore. The oxygen then binds to the sodium, creating sodium oxide. 

This sodium oxide can then be heated to 500°C (932°F), which releases the oxygen and allows the sodium to be used once again.

Carbon, on the other hand, needs to be heated to 1,400°C (2,552°F) to achieve the same effect. And while it still involves the process of combining with oxygen, it also causes harmful carbon dioxide emissions to be released into the atmosphere.

Helios has raised $17 million thus far from government grants, mining companies such as Anglo American (one of world’s largest), angel investors and venture capital firms including Tech Energy Ventures and At One Ventures. 

The startup, which is based in Kochav Yair in central Israel, is currently in the process of scaling up its technology.

It will demonstrate its capabilities next year when it completes its first pilot plant, which will be able to produce several tons of steel per day. 

The startup then plans on selling and licensing its hardware to conventional steel mills, rather than competing with them.

“Our agenda is to decarbonize the industry, and we want to do this as widely as possible,” Geifman explains.

“If we’re just another steelmaker competing in the market, we wouldn’t be able to do that. But if we’re enabling the whole market to use our technology, that’s a way faster approach.”

Geifman says that commercializing his startup’s technology for the production of green steel is also the shortest route to financing and achieving the end goal of space mining.

Helios ultimately aims to source metals and other resources beyond Earth – whether on asteroids, comets or the moon – in order to preserve the planet and minimize the damage that humans are causing it.

At present, says Geifman, this is an extremely expensive process, and there is no metal on the planet that is so costly that it justifies traveling to the stars to mine them. 

“We’re trying to pave a way for that to actually be economically viable,” he explains. 

“There is a long road we need to take in order to get there, but someone has to do this.”

According to Geifman, it is uncertain whether future generations will have the same opportunity to do this as his company does now.

“As a species, we need to try and aspire for the ultimate sustainable solution and not just pass the problem onto the next generation without knowing what will happen.”

The post Green Steel: Startup Cuts Carbon Emissions With Sodium Substitute appeared first on NoCamels.