US-Israel Partnerships: Accelerating medical innovation

Harnessing the potential of bioinformatics

US-Israel Partnerships: Accelerating medical innovation

Harnessing the potential of bioinformatics

Researchers and other experts at Israeli and Bay Area medical centers are partnering to advance personalized medicine, promote integrative healthcare, and pursue drug development for diseases that have yet to see breakthroughs. Although the pandemic put in-person exchanges and academic gatherings on hold, technology not only enabled these collaborations to move forward, but also sparked new ways of sharing data and developing future-forward approaches.

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Harnessing the potential of bioinformatics

Bioinformatics involves developing algorithms and computer software to record and analyze biological data. This young field holds enormous potential for introducing an era of personalized medicine to treat diseases from cancer and diabetes to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. To advance this goal, Tel Aviv University (TAU) and UC Berkeley (UCB) are conducting collaborative research to develop computational tools that integrate genetic, genomic, and other patient data.

The partners had planned extensive in-person opportunities for graduate students and post-docs from TAU’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics and UCB to develop close working relationships. The pandemic put on hold major annual workshops and seminar series; joint research projects; and, an innovative joint summer research program to be hosted by the Simons Institute for Theory and Computing at UCB. Virtual seminars quickly rose to the fore as an excellent platform both for sharing research and for fostering personal connections. In June 2020, a TAU researcher whose work was supported by this collaboration presented a study about tracing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel, at a virtual symposium hosted by UCSF. Later in 2020, this initiative hosted two online seminars presenting studies regarding the pandemic’s spread.