Israel has an enormous relative advantage in this field due to the vast scope and high reliability of its databases.
Fourteen multidisciplinary teams received a collective NIS 60 million in grants to enable the expansion and development of personalized precision medicine in Israel and facilitate breakthroughs in the field’s global scientific frontiers.

The first cohort of the Israel Precision Medicine Partnership (IPMP) was announced on Monday. The grants for the project are among the largest ever awarded to Israeli researchers by an Israeli body.

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“All of these projects promote novel approaches to medical challenges,” said Prof. Benny Geiger, chairman of the Israel Science Foundation (ISF).

The research projects are meant to lead to a deeper understanding of human diseases and advance the implementation of new healthcare approaches. Teams are made up of individuals from a variety of backgrounds, including physicians, basic researchers, theoreticians, experimentalists, bioinformaticians, computer scientists, big-data specialists, engineers, statisticians, epidemiologists and others.

The 14 projects were selected by an international committee chaired by Prof. Roger Kornberg of Stanford University, a Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry.

Kornberg assembled what he described as a “real dream panel” to evaluate the applications. He told The Jerusalem Post that he could not reveal the members of the panel, but only said that they came from many leading international institutions. Only one judge was Israeli, while the rest were from Europe and the United States – an effort, he said, to ensure that there was no bias in the selection of the projects.

“I think it is a testament to the quality of applications and the Israeli medical community that this panel, truly of the highest caliber, found 14 of the applications meritorious according to the highest standard for funding in this first round,” Kornberg said…. (Excerpted from The Jerusalem Post article, by Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman)