Technion Integrated Cancer Center (TICC): Turning Big Ideas into Action

Compelling philanthropic initiatives often sound simple.

End child hunger. Educate all people. Spread clean water access. Help earthquake victims. Improve health care. Cure cancer.

But these bold objectives are not simple. These are big, complex ideas requiring tremendous resources that research universities are often best equipped to harness. Philanthropy is one of the key resources needed. We at ATS don’t actually execute these initiatives—but we play the critical role of translating the big ideas into action by connecting the diverse and sometimes disparate groups of people who can accomplish these far-reaching goals together.

In other words, we don’t solve the problem: we enable the Technion to assemble the team that can solve the problem. It’s a subtle but important distinction that was brought to life earlier this month, as we marked the opening of the Technion Integrated Cancer Center, a first-of-its-kind institution that brings together world-class clinical experts, a group of life science researchers led by a Nobel Prize winner, and top-level chemists, physicists and engineers to win the battle against cancer.

The TICC serves as a nexus for the Technion’s five affiliated hospitals that run clinical trials, the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine’s life sciences researchers, the Faculty of Computer Science’s innovations in processing large data sets, the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering’s and the Faculty of Physics’ development of devices for diagnosis and imaging, and the Faculty of Mathematics’ search for new, more powerful algorithms to quickly and effectively process complex data.

(l to r) Prof. Ze’ev Ronai, Co-Director of the TICC; Technion President Professor Peretz Lavie; Yona Yahav, Mayor of Haifa; Distinguished Professor Aaron Ciechanover, Co-Director of the TICC; Prof. Rafi Beyar, Director of the Rambam Healthcare Campus

Cancer is one of the greatest challenges of humankind today. In the U.S. alone, with its population of 300 million people, there are 1.5 million new cancer patients every year, causing 300,000 deaths. When I spoke with TICC Co-Director Ze’ev Ronai, he emphasized that harnessing the power of diverse, accomplished researchers and practitioners is essential to advancing our ability to combat cancer.

“We have quite a few ideas about how to combat this disease, but translating those ideas into actual drugs is not easy. We have to determine if the drugs work by finding the right patient population because not all patients will respond to certain drugs. And we need to develop new strategies to determine who those patients are,” Ronai said. “We used to develop the same drugs to attack cancer, but we now know that cancer is complex and heterogeneous. Our drugs need to be smart enough to attack the different elements of each different type of cancer.”

SOURCE

https://americantechniontoday.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/technion-integrated-cancer-center-ticc-turning-big-ideas-into-action/