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 future of humanity.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/artificial-sweeteners-hit-a-sour-note/
Sep 30, 2014...
Artificial sweeteners have long been promoted as "better" for us – diet sodas help us stay slim, sugar-free cookies provide a treat for diabetics. But breaking research from the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Dr. Eran Elinav and Prof. Eran Segal has dropped a bomb on such thinking: in fact, they say, artificial sweeteners may even be causing the very conditions they were presumed to prevent.
Dr. Elinav and Prof. Segal are scaling up their Personalized Nutrition Project, which aims to precisely measure how we as individuals process and metabolize food. While studying artificial sweeteners, they found that even though such products are not digested, they are detected by our trillions of gut bacteria. These bacteria, in turn, may trigger metabolic changes that have a number of negative health effects, such as increasing blood sugar.
Nov 05, 2018...
In 2017, the CDC reported that “more than 100 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes,” and that it was the seventh leading cause of death in 2015. And as Western diets and lifestyles spread around the world, so does diabetes.
Nutrition aside, the disease has a number of complex causes – yet treatment consists only of insulin and glucose-level management. That’s why Weizmann Institute of Science researchers in a range of disciplines are working to understand the developmental, genetic, immunological, and environmental contributors to diabetes. Given the potential impact of this work on public health, the scientists regularly collaborate with clinicians in order to bring their findings to the patient.
Oct 07, 2019...
A group of Israeli and German scientists has joined forces to defeat Ebola, one of the deadliest contagious diseases of the 21st century.A Weizmann Institute of Science lab recently started to work with a research team in Cologne, Germany, to gain a better understanding of how the vaccination against the virus affects the immune system.
“These vaccines -- made by recombinant methods that attach an Ebola protein to a harmless virus -- are hard to produce, and thus there is not enough of them to vaccinate an entire population,” explained Ron Diskin of Weizmann’s Structural Biology Department.“In addition, the civil strife in some areas where Ebola is rampant today, the facts that it is often needed in villages that are hard to reach and that because of its scarcity, the vaccine tends to be given only to those most closely connected to individuals who are already sick,” he further stated.“Understanding exactly how the immune response is produced following vaccination will not only help refine the vaccine, itself. It can help us understand whether it will work against different strains of the virus or whether the dose given today is the best one,” the scientist added. The Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission.According to the World Health Organization, the Ebola fatality rate is around 50%, but it can vary from 25% to 90% in different outbreaks.
Sep 17, 2014...
Electron microscope image of a healthy mouse small intestine showing bacteria (strings) surrounding the gut villi (protrusions). A human small intestine looks very similar.
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—September 17, 2014—Artificial sweeteners – promoted as aids to weight loss and diabetes prevention – could actually hasten the development of glucose intolerance and metabolic disease, and they do so in a surprising way: by changing the composition and function of the gut microbiota – the substantial population of bacteria residing in our intestines. These findings, the results of experiments in mice and humans, were published September 17 in Nature. Dr. Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Immunology, who led this research together with Prof. Eran Segal of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, says that the widespread use of artificial sweeteners in drinks and food, among other things, may be contributing to the obesity and diabetes epidemic that is sweeping much of the world.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/nobel-prize-in-chemistry-2013/
Oct 09, 2013...
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—October 9, 2013—The Weizmann Institute of Science extends its hearty congratulations to the new winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2013. Two of the three new laureates have strong ties to the Weizmann Institute, and their work on the use of computers to map chemical reactions of large molecules such as enzymes on the atomic scale was first developed at Weizmann.
Profs. Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt began their scientific collaboration in the 1960s at the Weizmann Institute, where Prof. Warshel was a doctoral student. The two of them worked with the late Prof. Shneior Lifson in the Department of Chemical Physics. Together, they developed a computer program that ran on the Institute’s Golem computer – a powerful device in those days – to model molecules. This program had special relevance for large biological molecules.
Dec 26, 2017...
A Year of Wonder
1. Compound kills energy generating system of cancer
An Israeli researcher devised a synthetic compound to disable the enzymes that allow cancer cells to metastasize.
When cancer cells leave the primary tumor and spread to other organs, they reprogram their energy-generating system in order to survive in harsh conditions with a shortage of nutrients like glucose.
Prof. Uri Nir of Bar-Ilan University identified an enzyme called FerT in the energy-generating mitochondria of metastatic cancer cells – an enzyme normally only found in sperm cells (which need to function outside the body they came from). When he targeted FerT in lab mice, the malignant cells soon died.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/can-the-organ-of-life-save-lives/
Oct 20, 2017...
Prof. Reuven Or, from the Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cancer Immunotherapy Research Center, speaks with Pluristem CEO Zami Aberman last month. (photo credit:PLURISTEM)
More than 13,000 Americans are diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndromes, a group of blood disorders associated with abnormal blood cell production. The average length of survival depends on the case, but the prognosis is often bad. However, according to Prof. Reuven Or, from the Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cancer Immunotherapy Research Center at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, a new method that would prolong survival and improve quality of life for these patients is on the horizon.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/brain-on-a-chip-reveals-how-the-brain-folds/
Feb 20, 2018...
Fluorescence images show the development of an organoid over days 3-11, in which the emergence of wrinkles is clearly seen
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—February 20, 2018— Being born with a “tabula rasa” – a clean slate – is, in the case of the brain, something of a curse. Our brains are already wrinkled like walnuts by the time we are born. Babies born without these wrinkles – called smooth brain syndrome – suffer from severe developmental deficiencies and their life expectancy is markedly reduced. The gene that causes this syndrome recently helped Weizmann Institute of Science researchers to probe the physical forces that cause the brain’s wrinkles to form. In their findings, reported in Nature Physics, the researchers describe a method they developed for growing tiny “brains on chips” from human cells that enabled them to track the physical and biological mechanisms underlying the wrinkling process.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/divine-secrets-of-the-ant-sisterhood/
Nov 29, 2011... "In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed," wrote Darwin. Ants, a family that has inhabited the earth for about 100 million years, must be one of the most magnificent manifestations of such biological cooperation. Thousands of female ants pull together in a coordinated effort to ensure that all the needs are met for the proper functioning of the entire colony. (The males' only role is to mate with the queen, and once this is completed, they die). While some ants forage, others stay behind to tend the brood, or to build, maintain or defend the colony's living quarters; and there are even those whose task it is to bury the dead. But the thing that makes their behavior so remarkable is that they have no leader — no boss or governing body to allocate and manage their activities. How exactly do ants collaborate and divide the labor among themselves so successfully and altruistically?
Jan 02, 2019...
Cholesterol plaque illustration by Hywards/Shutterstock.com
You probably know that LDL cholesterol is “bad” and that too much of it in your blood puts you at risk of atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries.
A group of Israeli researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science wanted to understand how cholesterol, a basic component of life, can turn deadly.
The job of cholesterol is to provide elasticity to the fatty substance that makes up cell membranes. LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol acts as “packaging” to help cholesterol travel through the blood, and can even clear away molecular cholesterol that settles on blood vessel walls.
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