ISRAEL21c was founded in 2001, in the wake of the Second Intifada, to broaden public understanding of Israel beyond typical portrayals in the mainstream media.
The organization’s founders – Israeli-American technology executives – understood the great power of the Internet and developed a first-of-its kind online product with global appeal and reach.
In July 2012, ISRAEL21c wrote about a novel device from Caesarea-based IceCure Medical that was revolutionizing how American doctors remove benign breast lumps.
The device uses minimally invasive cryoablation to destroy the tumor by freezing it rather than surgically removing it.
Since then, IceCure’s ProSense system has expanded its applications dramatically.
Of the 463 million people in the world with diabetes, up to 95 percent have type 2 (T2D). In T2D, peripheral tissues – mostly muscles — are resistant to insulin, a hormone made by the pancreas to stabilize blood-sugar levels and enable the body to use and store sugar.
Medications available today treat the symptoms and complications of T2D but do not solve the core problem of insulin resistance.
Researchers believe that autism is caused by mutations in the egg or sperm or during pregnancy, particularly in the activity-dependent neuroprotective protein (ADNP) gene.
A new Tel Aviv University study published in Molecular Psychiatry found that ADNP mutations continue to occur in old age and accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients.
Can diabetics throw away their insulin pumps simply by changing their diets?
Israeli research published in Diabetes Care suggests that the standard diet recommended for diabetics is making things worse.
Perhaps counter intuitively, eating a big breakfast of starches and sugars can help diabetics replace the need to inject insulin, while at the same time reducing the weight gain associated with diabetes and improving overall cardiovascular health.
It wasn’t going to be easy to remove a brain tumor threatening the life of 2-year-old Ari Ellman of San Francisco. Experts at several US hospitals weren’t even sure it was possible.
But Ari’s tumor was removed, piece by piece, in a groundbreaking endonasal surgery lasting nearly 18 hours.
Israeli scientists have revealed a potential weapon in the battles against air pollution, deforestation and climate change: bacteria engineered to eat carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment.
Prof. Ron Milo’s plant and environmental sciences research lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science published a report on the study in Cell on November 27.
An air-raid siren awakened Erez Lugashi one night in 2014. As he ran for shelter, he wondered: What would a deaf person doin this situation?
That question led the experienced Tel Aviv entrepreneur to start Abilisense. The idea was to develop software for IoT devices, such as smart watches, that sends vibrating or visual alerts to hearing-impaired individuals about anything from an air-raid siren to a crying baby.
A little molecule named PJ34 can cause cancer cells to self-destruct, according to an Israeli study published recently in the biomedical journal Oncotarget.
With the global population of bees in decline, honey could become a rare commodity on supermarket shelves.
A team of 12 students from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has been working for the past year on the development of a bee-free honey. It’s produced by the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, which “learns” to make honey following reprogramming in a lab.
November is Alzheimer’s Awareness Month. It’s a fitting time to look at the latest Israeli advances in preventing, diagnosing and treating the progressive and incurable brain disorder.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of the 9.9 million new cases of dementia diagnosed each year worldwide. The disease primarily strikes the elderly population, affecting 30 percent of those over age of 85.
AD impacts memory, thinking and language skills, and even the ability to carry out simple tasks.
In a horrific story of terror at 10,000 feet, an 8-year-old girl with severe food allergies was exposed to pistachio shells that had been left, unbeknownst to her and her usually vigilant parents, in the seatback pocket of the row in front of her during a harrowing 2014 airplane ride home.
The girl’s throat swelled – she was going into anaphylactic shock – and, despite her parents immediately injecting her with an emergency shot of epinephrine, she remained highly agitated during the remaining three hours of the flight.
Hospital bedsheets and patient gowns are a major conduit for transferring dangerous bacteria estimated to infect 1.7 million hospitalized Americans and 3.5 million hospitalized Europeans every year. In the United States, hospital-acquired infections kill about 98,000 people yearly.
Want to insulate your office from the heat and cold outside, while purifying the air inside from potential toxins? Israeli startup Vertical Field is accomplishing that with sensor-controlled indoor and outdoor “green walls” installed by the likes of clients such as the Israeli offices of Google, Apple, Intel and Facebook.
Indoor air pollution is an invisible but serious problem. High levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in offices, classrooms, homes, trains and planes could be affecting our cognitive performance and in more severe cases may trigger inflammation or even kidney calcification and bone demineralization, according to a recent study published in Nature Sustainability.
Immunotherapy is a promising cancer treatment that enhances the natural immune response.
A new study led by Dr. Yaron Carmi of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine finds that a form of immunotherapy — chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) T-cell therapy, used to treat the blood cancer leukemia– may work against other kinds of cancer as well.
Your body is composed of about 10 trillion human cells. It’s also home to about 100 trillion tiny microbes, mainly bacteria, that wield astonishing power over your health.
Many influences, from genetics, to diet and stress, contribute to the makeup of your microbiome — the collective community of microbes as personal as a fingerprint.
Cancer is a devious adversary. It figures out all kinds of ways to hide from the body’s detection systems and grow unchecked until it’s too late to stop them.
One of cancer’s most cunning methods of evading the immune system is to increase the frequency of a kind of cellular “train” – a protein called XPO1 – that makes regular back-and-forth trips in and out of the nucleus of a cell. The XPO1 protein’s job is to shuttle other proteins to the right stops on the line.
Hundreds of drugs have been developed to address Alzheimer’s disease, says Dr. Shahar Arzy, director of the computational neuropsychiatry lab at Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. “Do you know how many have been found effective? Zero.”
But if patients could be diagnosed in the preclinical stages of the disease, perhaps some of the new biological medications showing excellent results in other domains of neurology could be effective when applied early enough in the course of Alzheimer’s disease.
In a groundbreaking study published in Scientific Reports, a research group headed by Sagi outlines the development of male Macrobrachium rosenbergii prawns with two female sex chromosomes and no male sex chromosome — a so-called “super shrimp” that produces only female offspring.