Technion ranks 6th in entrepreneurship, innovation

The Israel Institute of Technology ranks among world leaders in survey conducted by MIT.

By DANIELLE ZIRI
Technion students test flight pilotless vehicle_390 (photo credit: Courtesy Technion )
Technion students test flight pilotless vehicle_390
(photo credit: Courtesy Technion )
The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology ranked sixth in the world in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology survey released on Sunday that evaluated entrepreneurship and innovation in higher education institutions.
The ranking, which was put together by 61 experts from 20 countries, identified 120 universities that demonstrate “a decisive impact and significant contribution in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation.”
While the Technion came after MIT, Stanford, Cambridge, Imperial College and Oxford, it preceded the University of San Diego, Berkeley, ETH Zurich and the National University of Singapore.
The report also placed Israel, as a country, in third place in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation, after the US and the UK, but ahead of Sweden, Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands, China and Canada.
The survey, which was carried out in partnership with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia, also placed the Technion first in the category of universities which create or support technological innovation despite the challenging environment in which they operate.
Technion president Prof. Peretz Lavie addressed the survey on Sunday and said the rankings bring the Technion “closer to achieving its dream: to be among the 10 leading universities in the world.”
“It is not the first time that the Technion has received such prestigious international recognition,” he stressed. “The contribution of the Technion to Israel’s advanced industry is well-known throughout the world.”
“Just last year we were chosen by the City of New York to establish a center of scientific research with Cornell University,” Lavie added. “Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at the time that the Technion is the only university in the world which managed to reverse the economy of an entire country from exporter of oranges to advanced manufacturing and hi-tech.
“Now 61 experts from around the world confirmed this statement.”
A Hebrew University professor is to receive the American Association for Cancer Research’s 2013 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Chemistry, the organization announced Sunday. This comes on the heels of two Israeli Nobel Prize winners named members of its new international academy just days earlier.
Prof. Alexander Levitzki, an expert in biological chemistry at Hebrew University of Jerusalem ’s Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, will deliver his award lecture in Washington, DC, April 9, on “Eradicating Tumors by Targeting Nonviral Vectors Carrying Poly- IC.”
The AACR said that Levitzki was chosen for the honor in recognition of his contributions to signal transduction therapy and his work on the development of tyrosine kinase inhibitors as effective agents against cancer.
Levitzki’s concept of targeted cancer therapy using protein tyrosine kinase inhibitors is extensively used by the international pharmaceutical industry to develop anti-cancer drugs.
His studies formed the basis for the development of drugs like imatinib, crizotinib and lapatinib – used for the treatment of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, lung cancer and breast cancer, respectively. There are more than 200 such inhibitors at various stages of the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval process.
His method of large-scale screening of synthetic compounds tested against a large spectrum of protein kinases for specificity – followed by systematic testing in cell lines and animal studies – became the standard procedure in most of the laboratories working in that field.
Levitzki has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Israel Prize in Biochemistry, Israel’s Wolf Prize for Medicine, the Hamilton-Fairley Award from the European Society of Medical Oncology, the Rothschild Prize in Biology and two Prostate Cancer Foundation Research Awards. Last year he received the Nauta Award in Pharmacochemistry, which is the highest award from the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry.
He is a board member of the Israel Cancer Association, was chairman of the division of natural sciences at the Israel Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the American Society of Biological Chemists and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization.
Just last week, Prof. Avraham Hershko and Prof. Aharon Ciechanover, the two Technion- Israel Institute of Technology researchers who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2004, were chosen to join the AACR’s academy as associates along with other world-class researchers who have made significant advances in the struggle against cancer.