The Health-Tech Valley Campus
The Health-Tech Home We Build Together
The joint Bar-Ilan and Sheba Medical Center campus in Ramat Gan’s Health-Tech Valley will use proximity to push medicine past incremental interventions and achieve life-saving innovation.
It Takes a Valley
In 2016, a researcher approached Prof. Shulamit Michaeli, then dean of the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, with a request for help. The researcher believed he could develop a breakthrough treatment for a disease, but to do so, he needed ongoing access to patients’ blood stem cells. So Michaeli called the head of cancer research at Sheba Medical Center, who teamed the researcher up with a physician in immunology. Three years later, she concludes, the two are using a patient’s own, “corrected” stem cells to generate a healthy immune system.
This story is a perfect example, explains Michaeli, of the breakthroughs we can cause by bringing Bar-Ilan life-sciences researchers into contact with clinicians—literally. And it’s one that Michaeli, previously the vice president of research and now directer of the university’s new biotech initiative with Sheba, expects to see repeated many times over in the coming years and decades. Called Health-Tech Valley, the first-of-its-kind initiative leverages collaboration to advance Bar-Ilan’s bold mission: making Israel a global leader in bio-convergence R&D. An emerging field that combines medicine and engineering with the life and exact sciences to drive new healthcare innovations, bio-convergence holds the potential to be a new growth engine for Israel’s economy.
“The Health-Tech ecosystem will be transformative for Israel, which has the potential to lead the world in biomedical innovation, and transformative for Bar-Ilan, which is poised to become the leading university in Israel for biomedical research.”
— Prof. Shulamit Michaeli
Featuring more than 20 wet labs for physical samples and chemicals, five dry labs for biomedical informatics, chemical engineering, and computational analysis, and a state-of-the-art shared laboratory for use by Bar-Ilan and Sheba scientists, the new Bar-Ilan Health-Tech Valley Campus—located right next to Sheba—will take collaboration to a new level, in some cases by hosting researchers whose work can benefit dramatically from clinical partnerships. In other cases, the collaboration will be located in a single individual: Nearly a third of the labs are earmarked for physician-scientists from Sheba, who will also become researchers and lecturers in Bar-Ilan’s faculties. Additionally, the Health-Tech Valley Campus will be home to Bar-Ilan researchers with ongoing partnerships with Sheba doctors, with the aim of accelerating the establishment of new biomedical companies.
Since her appointment as head of the Health-Tech Valley Initiative in the fall, Michaeli has worked with CEO and Senior Vice President Zohar Yinon on finalizing the agreement between Health-Tech Valley’s partners, which include the Migdal Insurance Company and the City of Ramat Gan. Yinon also obtained the green light for the construction of the building—the foundation for which is now being dug—and Michaeli began recruiting and raising awareness of the initiative among outstanding life- and exact-science researchers from both Israel and abroad. “Our goal is to create a community whose different areas of expertise all complement each other and create a whole much bigger than the sum of its parts,” she says. She is also strengthening the connection between Bar-Ilan and Sheba by means of “glue grants,” through which each institution receives half the funding for a joint project. Currently, there are five projects funded for senior scientists and two for junior scientists, on topics including the interplay of bacteria and tumors in breast cancer, the influence of blood-brain barrier dysfunction in diabetes, and the potential uses of gut microbiota in cellular therapy for metastatic melanoma.
“The Health-Tech ecosystem will be transformative for Israel, which has the potential to lead the world in biomedical innovation, and transformative for Bar-Ilan, which is poised to become the leading university in Israel for biomedical research,” Michaeli says. “But most of all, the results will be transformative for patients, who have waited too long for cures. It’s time to do more, and now the Health-Tech Valley Campus will be a critical push in the right direction.”
