The violent protests by pro-Hamas students in universities throughout the US and in Europe who call for academic and investment boycotts against Israel are causing great worry among researchers here. Scientific and medical interchange and grants are the lifeblood of research for this country.
On Thursday, Innovation, Science, and Technology, Minister Gila Gamliel, instructed her ministry’s senior officials to formulate, together with medical centers and other institutions, a model for funding medical research here.
Visiting the research department of Haifa’s Rambam Health Care Campus, Gamliel said her office views the wave of offensive academic boycotts against Israelis very seriously and that this trend undermines freedom of research.
The minister announced that she is countering the phenomenon as part of a special forum she established in her office and in the international arena to lift the boycott.
RRambam director-general Prof. Michael Halberthal said that he hopes to strengthen the relationship with the ministry so that it will be able to promote research activity in the hospitals.
“The innovative research and its clinical applications at Rambam are a significant advantage for saving lives and advanced treatment of diseases, and I congratulate the team for the pioneering research. The dedicated teams and the high preparedness for emergency situations are impressive.
The plan is for developing customized, personalized medicine through research and innovation that will promote faster and more effective treatments,” she said. “My office will continue to support the promotion of advanced medical research and innovation here and in all hospitals in Israel.The head of Rambam’s research division, Prof. Lior Gepstein, presented to the minister the initiative established and led by the hospital, within the framework of a joint research network to be established by the country’s major hospitals. “We have received encouragement and support from the ministry to consider a model for funding research for the benefit of public health,” Gepstein added.
Threats of BDS movement
Gamliel raised the BDS (boycott, divest, and sanctions) threat against Israeli research institutions and researchers and asked for a review of how much the anti-Israeli attacks in the world affect the field of research and the relationship between research institutions and a hospital like Rambam.Dr. Amir Minerbi, deputy director of Rambam’s Pain Relief Institute summarized for the minister the comprehensive research he is conducting together with Dr. Milena Pitshany on the connection between the bacteria of the digestive system and the disease of fibromyalgia.“If in the past we participated in numerous conferences a year in our field of research, this year we participated in only one. On a personal level, the personal relationships we forged with researchers from all over the world continue, but on the institutional level we feel more tension and hostility,” said Minerbi.“From the development of a stent for cardiac catheterization to the creation of a beating heart in the laboratory, Rambam has signed off on some of the most groundbreaking medical inventions in the world,” the Haifa researchers said. “With a powerful combination of artificial intelligence, big data, tissue printing for transplantation and advanced developments for cancer treatment that accompany researchers from the concept stage to commercialization and registering patents, Rambam continues to lead the field of medical development and research.”The doctors have presented to the ministry and the heads of the Innovation Authority the main areas of research in which medicine is moving in the next five years.“It starts with the development of methods to treat infectious diseases in children, using the microbiome – the bacterial environment that lives in the intestine – to fight pain and chronic diseases.”It continues with “the development of immunotherapy treatments and especially the CAR-T technology in which we teach cells of the immune system to act in the body to relieve chronic disorders and eliminate tumors.”It goes on to “tissue printing and the creation of ‘organs on a chip’ that are created from patients’ own tissues and can be used for personalized medicine and transplants,” said Dr. Shlomit Yehudai-Reshef, head of Rambam’s clinical research unit.