About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the benefit of humanity.
Oct 07, 2019...
A group of Israeli and German scientists has joined forces to defeat Ebola, one of the deadliest contagious diseases of the 21st century.A Weizmann Institute of Science lab recently started to work with a research team in Cologne, Germany, to gain a better understanding of how the vaccination against the virus affects the immune system.
“These vaccines -- made by recombinant methods that attach an Ebola protein to a harmless virus -- are hard to produce, and thus there is not enough of them to vaccinate an entire population,” explained Ron Diskin of Weizmann’s Structural Biology Department.“In addition, the civil strife in some areas where Ebola is rampant today, the facts that it is often needed in villages that are hard to reach and that because of its scarcity, the vaccine tends to be given only to those most closely connected to individuals who are already sick,” he further stated.“Understanding exactly how the immune response is produced following vaccination will not only help refine the vaccine, itself. It can help us understand whether it will work against different strains of the virus or whether the dose given today is the best one,” the scientist added. The Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission.According to the World Health Organization, the Ebola fatality rate is around 50%, but it can vary from 25% to 90% in different outbreaks.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/nobel-prize-in-chemistry-2013/
Oct 09, 2013...
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—October 9, 2013—The Weizmann Institute of Science extends its hearty congratulations to the new winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2013. Two of the three new laureates have strong ties to the Weizmann Institute, and their work on the use of computers to map chemical reactions of large molecules such as enzymes on the atomic scale was first developed at Weizmann.
Profs. Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt began their scientific collaboration in the 1960s at the Weizmann Institute, where Prof. Warshel was a doctoral student. The two of them worked with the late Prof. Shneior Lifson in the Department of Chemical Physics. Together, they developed a computer program that ran on the Institute’s Golem computer – a powerful device in those days – to model molecules. This program had special relevance for large biological molecules.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-january-2007/
Jan 24, 2007...
Weizmann Institute Scientists Discover a Genetic Risk Factor for Smoking-linked Head and Neck Cancer
A simple blood test may be able to identify those most at risk for developing head and neck cancer as a result of smoking. This was the finding of a recent study by Prof. Zvi Livneh, Head of the Weizmann Institute’s Biological Chemistry Department, Dr. Tamar Paz-Elizur of the same department, and their research team that worked in collaboration with Dr. Rami Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv-Sourasky Medical Center, Prof. Laurence Freedman of Sheba Medical Center and Prof. Edna Schechtman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/hillel-s-tech-corner-revolutionizing-the-flu-shot/
Jul 25, 2019...
BiondVax
A universal flu vaccine is the key to combating the ever-mutating flu virus, but did we ever really stop to think about whether there is a better way?
The flu virus, or influenza, is far more than a week-long inconvenience that pulls us away from our commitments, although that, in and of itself, is pretty annoying. The flu can get deadly fast. According to the World Health Organization, influenza kills up to 650,000 people each year. Read that number again. In the US alone, the flu kills about 12,000 people in mild years, and up to 56,000 people in the more severe years, according to the Center for Disease Control.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/making-personalized-medicine-a-reality/
Nov 24, 2014...
The Nancy and Stephen Grand Israel National Center for Personalized Medicine is the Weizmann Institute of Science’s first comprehensive initiative to translate genetic and molecular data into information that may one day be used for more precise, more individualized patient care.
“Personalized medicine – or ‘precision medicine,’ as it has been termed by the NIH – is a form of medicine that uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat patients,” says Dr. Berta Strulovici, the new center’s director. “In the future, this knowledge will give doctors the ability to assess medical risks and monitor and treat patients according to their specific genetic makeup and molecular phenotype.”
Apr 11, 2007... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—April 11, 2007—Muscle fibers are large cells that contain many nuclei. They begin, like all animal cells, as naive embryonic cells. These cells differentiate, producing intermediate cells called myoblasts that are now destined to become muscle. New myoblasts then seek out other myoblasts, and when they find each other, they stick together like best friends. In the final stage of muscle fiber development, the cell membranes of attached myoblasts open up and fuse together, forming one large, unified cell.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/stem-cell-reprogramming-made-easier/
Sep 18, 2013... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—September 18, 2013—Embryonic stem cells have the enormous potential to treat and cure many medical problems. That is why the discovery that induced embryonic-like stem cells can be created from skin cells was rewarded with a Nobel Prize in 2012. But the process of creating such cells has remained frustratingly slow and inefficient, and the resulting stem cells are not yet ready for medical use. Research in the lab of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Dr. Jacob (Yaqub) Hanna, which appears September 18 in Nature, dramatically changes that: He and his group have identified the “brake” that holds back the production of stem cells, and found that releasing this brake can both synchronize the process and increase its efficiency from around one percent or less today to 100 percent. These findings may help facilitate the production of stem cells for medical use, as well as advancing our understanding of the mysterious process by which adult cells can revert back into their original, embryonic state.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-july-2012/
Jul 27, 2012... As sulfur cycles through Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land, it undergoes chemical changes that are often coupled to changes in other such elements as carbon and oxygen. Although this affects the concentration of free oxygen, sulfur has traditionally been portrayed as a secondary factor in regulating atmospheric oxygen, with most of the heavy lifting done by carbon. However, new findings that appeared this week in Science suggest that sulfur’s role may have been underestimated.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/new-hope-for-gaucher-patients/
Jan 21, 2014... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—January 19, 2014—What causes brain damage and inflammation in severe cases of Gaucher disease? Little is known about the events that lead to brain pathology in some forms of the disease, and there is currently no treatment available — a bleak outlook for sufferers and their families. Now, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science have discovered a new cellular pathway implicated in Gaucher disease. Their findings, published today in Nature Medicine, may offer a new therapeutic target for the management of this disease, as well as other related disorders.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/programmed-proteins-might-help-prevent-malaria/
Jan 26, 2017...
A malaria vaccine based on stabilized proteins could circumvent today’s problems with creating an inexpensive, stable vaccine
Despite decades of malaria research, the disease still afflicts hundreds of millions and kills around half a million people each year – most of them children in tropical regions. Part of the problem is that the malaria parasite is a shape-shifter, making it hard to target. But another part of the problem is that even the parasite’s proteins, which could be used as vaccines, are unstable at tropical temperatures and require complicated, expensive cellular systems to produce them in large quantities. Unfortunately, the vaccines are most needed in areas where refrigeration is lacking and funds to buy vaccines are scarce. However, a new approach developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science, recently reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), could, in the future, lead to an inexpensive malaria vaccine that can be stored at room temperature.
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