Pioneers in research that has led to better health and medicine world-wide, Weizmann has a long list of achievements.
Weizmann Institute of Science researchers have found that people may have a tendency to form friendships with individuals who have a similar body odour. The researchers were even able to predict the quality of social interactions between complete strangers by first...
Ketamine, a well-known anaesthetic used in smaller doses as a party drug, was hailed as a “new hope for depression” in a Time magazine cover story in 2017. Two years later, the arrival of the first ketamine-based antidepressant – the nasal spray esketamine, made by...
Our family origins tend to shape our future in many ways. A Weizmann Institute of Science study, published in Nature, found that the same holds true for blood vessels. The researchers discovered blood vessels forming from unexpected progenitors and went on to show...
Supporting actors sometimes steal the show, and in a new study published this week in Cell, researchers, headed by Professor Ido Amit at the Weizmann Institute of Science, showed that supporting cells called fibroblasts – long viewed as uniform background players –...
Genetic mutations linked to a disease often spell bad news. Mutations in over 25 genes, for example, are associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and they all increase the risk of developing this incurable disorder. Now, a research team headed by Professor...
Immunotherapies for cancer rely on recruiting the patient’s immune system, but they still fall far short of tapping into the entire arsenal of the body’s natural defences. In fact, most such therapies draw on one type of immune defines: the ability of T cells to...
Even fans of black-and-white film cannot deny that colour brought new life to photography and motion pictures – but when it comes to learning what happens inside the body, there’s no substitute for colour. For example, were it possible to map out real-time gene...
Today, people suspected of having inflammatory bowel disease are often required to undergo a colonoscopy, an invasive procedure performed under anaesthesia. A new method developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in collaboration with the Sheba Medical Center at...
One day the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Professor Eldad Tzahor peered into his lab’s microscope and saw steak. As part of Tzahor’s research into repairing muscle tissue, Dr Tamar Eigler, a postdoctoral fellow in his lab had been experimenting with cultured muscle...
In the not-so-distant past, the discovery of a supernova – an exploding star – was considered a rare occasion. For example, when Professor Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute’s Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department and Dean of Weizmann’s Physics Faculty,...
Cigarette smoking, practiced by over a billion people worldwide, is considered a leading cause of disease, accounting for over six million deaths each year. Many people don’t quit smoking, despite expressing a desire to do so, because they are concerned about the...
An exclusive ‘licence’ for making insulin in the human body belongs to the beta cells scattered throughout the pancreas. But because beta cells can become scarce or dysfunctional in people with diabetes, scientists have been searching for other cells that might be...
A brown blotch on a plant leaf may be a sign that the plant’s defences are hard at work: When a plant is infected by a virus, fungus or bacterium, its immune response keeps the disease from spreading by killing the infected cell, as well as a few surrounding ones. A...
The Weizmann Institute of Science recently announced a lead philanthropic donation of $US50 million from the Azrieli Foundation, to enable catalytic brain research with the establishment of The Azrieli Institute for Brain and Neural Sciences. The donation is among the...
Immunotherapy has sparked new hope for people with cancer, but for it to work, the patient’s immune system must be able to 'see' the tumour. There are ways of enhancing this recognition in individual cases, yet such solutions are, by definition, personalised, which...
Tracing the evolution of protein maintenance in cellular ‘boroughs’, students of the Weizmann Institute’s Professor Dan Tawfik's have now published their study following his untimely death. When we contemplate the grandeur of life that evolution has crafted – a...
A new therapeutic approach developed by Weizmann Institute scientists could spell new hope in the battle against COVID-19. Even though vaccines may be steering the world toward a post-pandemic normal, a constantly mutating SARS-CoV-2 necessitates the development of...
In a new study just published in Nature, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, unveiled for the first time how three-dimensional space is represented in the mammalian cortex by the brain’s...
During the six weeks between the end of the first COVID-19 outbreak in Israel and the beginning of the second one (late April to early June of 2020), researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science initiated a study that encompassed more than 12,000 responses from...
New research from the Weizmann Institute of Research shows that changes to the extracellular matrix could point to the future development of inflammatory bowel diseases. The morbidity rate of inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis...
New research that reveals the details of an alternative cell death may lead to new therapies for a variety of diseases. Unlikely causes of death, like lightning, may strike out of the blue, but for our cells even an unusual form of death is not left to chance. That’s...
A natural food supplement reduces anxiety in mice, according to a new Weizmann Institute of Science study. The plant-derived substance, beta-sitosterol, was found to produce this effect both on its own and in synergic combination with an antidepressant known under the...
Can a protein found in a mosquito lead to a better understanding of the workings of our own brains? Professor Ofer Yizhar and his team in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Neurobiology Department took a light-sensitive protein derived from mosquitos and used it to...
Severe symptoms of COVID-19, leading often to death, are thought to result from the patient’s own acute immune response rather than from damage inflicted directly by the virus. Immense research efforts are therefore invested in figuring out how the virus manages to...