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.
Apr 01, 2020...
JERUSALEM — Teams of epidemiologists and computer scientists on three continents have started mass population surveys to try to get ahead of the coronavirus and ensure that scarce diagnostic tests, and even scarcer ventilators, are sent where they can do the most good.
More than two million people in Britain and 150,000 Israelis have already completed simple questionnaires, and many are updating their answers daily. Analysts of the data — including symptoms of Covid-19 and test results, as well as risk factors and demographics — say they have been able to identify incipient outbreaks days ahead of the authorities.
Mar 25, 2020... Israel is suffering a shortage of coronavirus tests, and the Weizmann Institute – working with the Ministry of Health – has transformed scientific facilities into medical facilities in order to conduct more testing. Institute leadership expects that the labs should be able to run 4,000 tests per day.
Mar 25, 2020... In just one week, Profs. Ido Amit and Eran Elinav, both of the Department of Immunology, have built one of the highest-tech labs in the world. They developed a new type of PCR testing that is tremendously fast: if current capabilities test one patient at a time, the new method can test all of Israel simultaneously. The scientists intend to make their method available to anyone who needs it.
Jun 01, 2020...
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the public last week to “return to normalcy, get a cup of coffee, a glass of beer… have fun” – and that is what most Israelis did.
But that return to normalcy appears to have runneth over, and the cup is apparently no longer half full.
As Israelis declined to comply with social-distancing directives, children returned to school, restaurants opened, and the number of people screened for the novel coronavirus dropped, the country quickly started to see a surge in active cases of SARS-CoV-2.
May 08, 2020...
It started with a tweet. Alpha Lee, co-founder and chief scientific officer of machine-learning company PostEra, read on Twitter that Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility, had identified a set of chemical fragments that attach to an important coronavirus protein.
Lee wondered if his company, formed just six months earlier, could help connect the dots from fragments to viable drugs to fight COVID-19. PostEra uses AI algorithms to map routes for drug synthesis to speed the drug discovery process. But to do so, they would need some design ideas. So Lee asked the Internet.
Mar 27, 2020...
Israeli and British scientist are pioneering a revolutionary method of scientific research that could see a candidate for an anti-coronavirus drug emerge “within weeks.”
The teams at the Weizmann Institute for Science in Israel and the Diamond Light Source laboratory in Oxfordshire, which are together pioneering an “open” and fast research method, outlined their current findings and research plans in a discussion hosted by Weizmann UK on Thursday.
Apr 05, 2020...
Is your sense of smell suddenly not working very well? Not to panic you, but sudden olfactory loss has emerged as a significant symptom in about 60 percent of COVID-19 patients.
In fact, in France, people reporting a dramatic drop-off in their ability to smell are automatically assumed coronavirus-positive.
Based on this data, Weizmann Institute scientists, in collaboration with Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, developed SmellTracker – an online platform that enables self-monitoring of smell in order to detect early signs of COVID-19.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/can-a-two-day-workweek-eradicate-coronavirus/
Apr 01, 2020...
Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have developed a new model for containing the spread of Covid-19 while also maintaining economic activity. The key, they say, is a two-day workweek.
According to Professor Uri Alon, a systems biologist, his doctoral students Omer Karin and Yael Korem, and computer engineer Boaz Dudovich, a weekly cycle of two workdays followed by five days of lockdown can provide a good trade-off between minimizing the health impact of coronavirus and keeping the economy healthy. Ultimately, the researchers said, this model can help eradicate the virus.
Apr 19, 2020...
Tech companies, health insurers and governments are turning to artificial intelligence to predict potential coronavirus outbreaks and help guide policy decisions about social-distancing as pressure mounts to end lockdowns.
The software, they say, can learn to flag disease risk and outbreak threats based on personal data, such as medical history, real-time body-temperature readings and current symptom reports, as well as demographics.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/how-to-reopen-society-more-quickly/
Apr 21, 2020...
Countries are facing stark and terrible choices now. End the lockdown to restart their economies but risk the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic, or prolong the lockdown and inflict more heavy damage on people’s lives and on the economy.
Large-scale testing is unfeasible in some of the most affected countries and antibody testing to detect immunity is struggling with reliability issues. That makes it difficult to identify the subpopulations that can be allowed out of the lockdown and to determine how long others need to remain sequestered.There is a way out. According to Uri Alon and Ron Milo at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, we can exploit the way coronavirus develops in human beings to begin to open our societies for four days out of every 14.
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