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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 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.
Apr 20, 2020...
Humans touch their own faces often because they are subconsciously smelling themselves for a variety of reasons, scientists believe. The team also conducted a survey to see whether people subconsciously smell themselves and others, and found more than half of the participants had smelled a stranger.
The authors of the article titled Are humans constantly but subconsciously smelling themselves? published in the journal Royal Society journal Philosophical Transactions B reviewed existing studies to understand if and why humans smell themselves.
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.
May 05, 2020... Dr Nir London, Senior Scientist, Department of Organic Chemistry, The Weizmann Institute of Science, has brought together a wide range of players—from academia in four countries, to biotech and contract research organisations, to specialised software companies—to accelerate the development of a drug against COVID-19. Dr London reveals more details about this endeavour, in interaction with Sanjiv Das
May 11, 2020...
If we cannot resume economic activity without causing a resurgence of Covid-19 infections, we face a grim, unpredictable future of opening and closing schools and businesses.
We can find a way out of this dilemma by exploiting a key property of the virus: its latent period — the three-day delay on average between the time a person is infected and the time he or she can infect others.
People can work in two-week cycles, on the job for four days then, by the time they might become infectious, 10 days at home in lockdown. The strategy works even better when the population is split into two groups of households working alternating weeks.
May 11, 2020...
If you’re getting bored in quarantine, here’s a fun new hobby to try: sniffing stuff in your kitchen. Two international projects are asking ordinary people to rate the scents of household items in order to gather data on one of COVID-19’s more mysterious symptoms: anosmia, the loss of the ability to smell.
It’s still unclear to scientists how widespread anosmia is among COVID-19 patients, which typically causes a fever, dry cough and difficulty breathing. And whether it can be a useful way to track the spread of the disease is still to be determined — leaving researchers eager to gather as much data on the symptom as possible.
Apr 20, 2020...
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—April 20, 2020—The Israel Institute for Biological Research and the Weizmann Institute of Science will join efforts in advancing research designed to develop ways to combat the coronavirus. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two Institutes on this matter has been signed in recent days.
The neighboring Institutes are characterized by their unique excellence in their respective fields, and collaboration between the two is likely to promote synergy and accelerate the process that scientists hope will lead to a medical solution to the coronavirus. The Institute for Biological Research’s Director General, Prof. Shmuel Shapira, and the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Vice President for Technology Transfer, Prof. Irit Sagi, say that signing the MoU is an important milestone among the broad range of joint activities established between the two Institutes.
Apr 12, 2020... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—April 12, 2020—Following an agreement signed this morning between Israel’s Ministry of Health and the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Institute started conducting tests today diagnose coronavirus. The tests will be carried out at the Nancy and Stephen Grand Israel National Center for Personalized Medicine, established by and operating at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Grand Center’s world-class, cutting-edge lab facilities include advanced polymerase chain reaction (PCR) systems, which are capable of rapid and efficient gene identification.
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