Health Tech Valley project/Ofir Berman, Maariv
"In the end these are our children, our parents and our health. This is our country and it is important for us to invest here."
So says Uzi Ben Eliezer, Vice President of Business Development of the Health Tech Valley project - a groundbreaking initiative to establish a technological and commercial medical center in Israel, which is promoted by Microsoft Israel, Sheba Tel Hashomer Hospital and other partners. The
Health Tech Valley project is a huge campus, established in These are in the area adjacent to the Sheba Hospital at a cost of approximately 2 billion dollars and will combine work complexes, laboratories, a hotel, tens of thousands of housing units and entertainment and commercial areas.
"Until now, there has not been one central place, such a world-class ecosystem, that connects the Sheba Medical Center, academia and industry under one roof," explains Ben Eliezer, "on the real estate side there will be offices, residences, wet and dry laboratories, commercial and recreational areas. We are bringing a new work model: technology, investments, regulation and infrastructure, all in one place."
Health Tech Valley project/Ofir Berman, Maariv
The location of the Health Tech Valley project in the center of the country and at a central station of the purple light rail line that will be paved at the same time as the estimated completion of the project (2028), attracts various strategic partners and large entities.
Along with Microsoft Israel and the Sheba Innovation Center (ARC), the Municipality of Ramat Gan, Mosaic (a national initiative to promote health in Israel), the American Mayo Clinic, Thomas Jefferson University and Bar Ilan University also take part.
As part of the project, a university center for youth will also be established by the partnership, alongside the education center already operating there, which will focus on health.
"We provide a platform that will bring the theoretical and the practical into one place, and next to all of this there will be the most advanced technologies of Microsoft in the research laboratories," says Ben Eliezer, "Israel is a percentage of the world's population and is responsible for 1% of all scientific publications. Now we will gather everything in one place that has It is where clinical studies are handled and a lot of data. What is important to the international companies is mainly the research arm, and we need to use this asset that we have here."
"All the companies that are in Sheba's news arm will be part of our campus," he emphasizes, "there is an unprecedented financial investment here in the most advanced infrastructures, a smart building, the best laboratories, everything that talents from all over the world need. We also understand that the place has to work 24 hours a day. For this purpose, we are also building a hotel that will cater to academic and medical tourism. There will be cafes and restaurants, we want to attract the younger generation."
Ben Eliezer emphasizes that during the Corona period, we began to see the culmination of the transition to digital revolution: "This allowed us to bring tools to consume services remotely, share data, and the ability to derive smart insights from that information. Until recently, collecting information and deciphering it, especially in the medical or research field, was a challenge Big, but today significant progress has been made in the field, especially by private companies."
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Health Tech Valley project/Ofir Berman, Maariv
"In terms of data, Israel is in a super advanced place compared to other countries. The health funds have been collecting digital information for decades, from the day of birth to death. There is gold here in terms of information, but a lot of technology and collaborations are needed to derive insights from this. The goal is to maximize activity by technological means through cross-industry collaborations under one roof. There will be research laboratories of companies from different fields or from the same industry, whether it is flavor start-ups, food companies, chocolate production, pharma or agriculture. The collaboration and data gives us a significant leap Here is an opportunity for companies that are under one roof to identify common challenges, and more importantly, to come up with ideas to solve the common problem."
"The patient's user experience will also change completely," adds Ben Eliezer, "we will build the national simulation center here that will respond to new technologies in the operating room environment, and for patients in general. In addition, the collaborations create a wider industry, such as pharmaceutical companies that are already interested , and companies involved in sports, who want to utilize the medical information to improve the service they provide to their customers."
"Improve eating habits"
As part of the collaboration, Microsoft is establishing a data lake in the project (storage of information on big data that allows all the companies in the project to create and consume information together, L.N.) and access to all the companies that will rent space for the medical cloud and the generative AI capabilities for their research.
These are start-ups and health giants from Israel and the world.
The purpose of the project is to connect many entities, including competitors, in order to solve challenges.
Lior Tzioni, director of the health and government sector at Microsoft Israel, explains that the collaboration between the company
and HealthTeach Valley allows various organizations in the fields of health, nutrition, sports, academia and research to share significant interdisciplinary information in one data lake securely, on Azure, Microsoft's cloud.
"Using Microsoft's platform and the Azure OpenAI tool, those organizations will be able to easily and professionally investigate the data and derive significant insights from it, which will dramatically affect the quality of the medical care we will receive, the quality of the food we will consume, and the eating habits and physical fitness of all of us," he explains.
"For example: today when a person comes for a medical examination, he receives his test results in isolation, regardless of the various tests and regardless of the population as a whole. This is at a time when health organizations in Israel are leading the world in the amount of digital medical information they keep, from the day of birth to the day of the person's death Countless insights can be generated and treatment in personalized medicine possible if only we can investigate this information. In the same screening tests it will also be possible to obtain comparative information for hundreds of thousands of people who have been tested in the same health organization, and specifically for each one according to gender, age, health condition, test results, etc. Using this, it is possible to conclude what the chances of that person getting, for example, arteriosclerosis in the coming years, as well as to give him nutritional and physical activity recommendations. The platforms that will be used as part of the collaboration are a result of the collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI, when in fact the capabilities they have reached in 'creative artificial intelligence' As part of the research at the start-up, all of Microsoft's technological platforms are integrated and allow it to copy capabilities such as ChatGPT to the corporate market in a secure manner, while maintaining privacy."
"We need an international industry"
Prof. Daniel Zeifman, chairman of the academic board of the National Science Foundation, who served as the tenth president of the Weizmann Institute of Science and is currently chairman of the Health Tech Valley project, emphasizes how necessary this project is.
"One of the things that the State of Israel lacked was this triangle of academia, clinical hospital and industry. We didn't know of a place in Israel that combined all three in a structured and meaningful way," he explains.
"Israel has a high reputation as a high-tech country," emphasizes Prof. Zeifman, "but when you start talking about the biomedical industry, or the life sciences and drug development, there are not many large companies in Israel. There is a representation of many foreign companies, but that is not our goal. Therefore The vision of the project is to create a place where we can set this triangle in motion, and for that we need the international industry. To attract the largest companies from the industry here, we had to establish the right infrastructure. We need to present our talents, we have no problem in Israel growing talents, between If it's scientists, engineers or technicians at a very high level.
"More than a real estate project, this is a Zionist project," notes Prof. Zeifman, "Israel is considered a prestigious country when it comes to medical research. But most doctors in Israel do not engage in medical research, and one of the problems The big thing in this field is that there is no recognized official status of a research doctor like in other countries. But in recent years, there has been more involvement of doctors in research, and this is important for two reasons: the doctor is much closer to the patient or the patient, and secondly, the hospitals and HMOs know how to collect data in an exceptional way." .
Health Tech Valley project/Ofir Berman, Maariv
Avi Baruch, VP of organization, manager and human resources and head of the HealthTech Valley administration, from the Sheba Medical Center, explains the importance of the cooperation of the medical institution which for years is regularly ranked among the ten best hospitals in the world, in a ranking based on a platform of research, innovation, activity and publication of articles "Our worldview is global," explains Baruch, "in our view, health is the future growth engine of the State of Israel.
We also saw this during the Corona period, and a large part of this will be the AI and data issues.
"This is the vision of Israel's health city. It contains a worldview that creates an ecosystem of a leading medical center, around which an industry develops that produces significant added value, which corresponds with the Start Up Nation."
Baruch emphasizes that the government and various organizations such as Joint are also involved in the development.
Economy Minister Nir Barkat even visited the place recently and heard the plans for the future.
"Our luck, if you can call it luck," he says, "is that the reality in Israel was that there was a leading medical center, surrounded only by the army, strawberry fields and greenhouses. The state, which was under pressure for residential buildings, decided to thaw the land and suddenly an area around thousands of acres that are starting to develop."
"Our concept, as a medical center, is to create an ecosystem here that contains several components that will provide added value. This is a hospital that treats people, research that we do here at a high level and professional collaborations, we generate companies and income for the State of Israel here. The second thing is residents, like -100,000 citizens who will live in the area. When we look at Israel's health city, they are actually our platform to produce this ecosystem. We are establishing over a million square meters of employment here, with some of the leading companies in Israel and the world in the fields of research and innovation. The goal is a platform for joint work, alongside Academia. Because the connection between academia, research, medicine, industry and residents creates a better society."
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