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.
May 11, 2020... Researchers in Israel have succeeded in determining the biological processes that characterize seriously ill COVID-19 patients, as compared to those who are only mildly affected. The researchers, headed by Prof. Ido Amit from the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, examined the differences between those who were seriously ill and lightly ill. They based their analysis partly on the virus’ activity at the single cell level.
May 14, 2020...
Throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, one of the greatest mysteries to confound researchers has been figuring out why the disease leaves some people almost completely unharmed, while others suffer serious conditions and die.
The answer, according to Israeli scientists, is that lungs of the worst-affected patients become riddled with immune cells that exacerbate the pathogen’s impact instead of fighting it. In patients who are less affected by the disease, this doesn’t happen, says the team from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
May 17, 2020...
An immune system run amok may be responsible for some Covid-19 patients faring worse than others, suggests a new international study led by immunology researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.
Published in the journal Cell on May 7, “Host-viral infection maps reveal signatures of severe COVID-19 patients,” researchers in the lab of Prof. Ido Amit introduce Viral-Track, a computational method they have validated to systematically detect viruses from multiple models of infection.
Apr 06, 2020...
A comprehensive review of published studies on gut microbiota, immunity and arthritis suggests that having a microbial imbalance may precede the development of spondyloarthritides and osteoarthritis.
The review, which was published in Seminars in Arthritis and Rheumatism, suggests a close connection between an impaired microbiota, the immune system and inflammatory arthritis.
“In this review, we presented data supporting the idea that dysbiosis via a close, dynamic and tightly regulated cross talk with gut-associated lymphoid tissue, governs the development of inflammatory arthropathies, such as rheumatoid arthritis, spondyloarthritis and osteoarthritis. It became clear that unfavorable dysbiosis-mediated immune alterations precede the development of these disorders suggesting causal relationships in this link,” wrote authors Alexander Kalinkovich of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Gregory Livshits of Tel Aviv University.
Apr 27, 2020... On May 2, 1986, while visiting my long-term colleague and friend Richard O’Reilly, the head of bone marrow transplantation at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, I received a strange phone call. It was from Richard Champlin, who worked at the Bone Marrow Transplant Center at UCLA. He tended to speak very fast, so it took me some time to understand from his over-excited voice that he was about to leave the next day for Moscow.
Apr 16, 2020... Immunologist Dr. Ziv Shulman is looking for antibodies to COVID by studying patients who have recovered from the virus. His work is “in a very exciting stage,” as he is now producing antibodies in the lab.
Apr 22, 2020... As he discusses in this video, Prof. Sarel Fleishman of the Department of Biomolecular Sciences is supporting multiple lines of coronavirus research at Weizmann – including his own.
May 14, 2020...
May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month. And one important fact to be aware of is that the most common skin cancers, basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, aren’t the ones that kill.
The least common variety, melanoma, causes most skin-cancer deaths because it quickly spreads (metastasizes) to other parts of the body.
That’s why many researchers around the world focus on melanoma, so-called because it starts in melanocyte cells that give skin its color.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/paying-the-price-of-protection/
May 19, 2020... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—May 19, 2020—Is the wanton killing of cells in autoimmune disease a case of mistaken identity, or does it arise from an important physiological service? The first is the commonly accepted view – that autoimmune attack is a sort of mistake. But the latter view may be closer to the truth, according to a new model proposed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Among other things, the model suggests a solution to the long-standing riddle of why some organs are susceptible to autoimmune diseases while others are not. The findings were published in the journal Immunity.
May 26, 2020...
Israeli researchers say they have found that autoimmune diseases, such as diabetes or thyroid dysfunctions, are generated by immune cells that become overzealous in their protective mission and end up causing harm — and they created a mathematical model that demonstrates this.
In a study published in Immunity, scientists at Rehovot’s Weizmann Institute of Science, decided to find out why some organs are susceptible to autoimmune diseases while others are not. For example, the thyroid gland is often attacked by the autoimmune disease thyroiditis — an inflammation of the thyroid gland that can cause fatigue, weight gain, confusion and depression — while other organs, like the parathyroid gland, in charge of regulating the amount of calcium in the blood and bones, are almost never hit by autoimmune diseases.
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