Research Landscape

Overall, Israel is one of the world’s leading nations in the life sciences. Over 35% of civilian R&D activities in Israel are in the life sciences sector. According to the Israel Export & International Cooperation Institute, approximately 800 million U.S. dollars were spent on research and development in the life sciences in 2004. The government alone was responsible for 308 million of this figure. Of the research in the life sciences, 65% is carried out at just seven universities and academic institutions: Hebrew University, Technion - Israel Institute of Technolgy, Tel Aviv University, Bar Ilan University, Ben Gurion University and the Weizmann Institute. The latter institution in particular serves as a nucleus for a number of biotech companies. (See “Corporate Landscape)

Israeli biotechnology took its first steps in the Daniel Sieff building – today the Weizmann Institute of Science. Researcher and later President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, developed an enzymatic synthesis for acetone using the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum.Source: Weizman Insitute of ScienceThe Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology is supporting biotechnology as a key future area for the Israeli high-tech industry in the context of the so-called Infrastructure Program. This was established in 1995 with the specific aim of strengthening inter-university and inter-academic research in the area of applied research and its industrial commercialisation.

Also created at the time was the National Committee for Biotechnology, an advisory body consisting of experts from research, industry and politics, which had the job of promoting and driving forward the development of biotechnology in Israel through the identification of potential obstacles. From 2002-2007, the Israeli Ministry of Research declared that biotechnology was to have the status of "national project", whereby research infrastructure and academic biotechnology research would be strengthened. This public funding has also contributed to the establishing of National Infrastructure Centres, which provide access to essential equipment and know-how, such as protein purification, gene therapies or high-throughput screening - essential for both basic and applied technology projects in science and industry. Whereas these technology centres tend to be specialised on proteomics, plant genomics or bioinformatics, genomic research is carried out at nearly all universities. In 1997, the Ministry of Science created the Israel National Laboratory for Genome Infrastructure (INLGI) across two centres at the Weizmann Institute Crown Human Genome Center and the Hebrew University.

Thanks to the liberal legislation (see Legal Framework) Israeli scientists are extremely busy – as well as successful - in the field of stem cell research. Indeed, in 2006, a bibliometric analysis conducted by the Jülich Research Centre (click here) found that between the years 2000-2004, Israel had the greatest number of published stem cell papers per 1 million of population. Israel’s 113 papers is far ahead of Sweden at 82, followed by Switzerland (76), the Netherlands (59), Austria (50) and the USA (47). (Click here for more on this study in German)

Agricultural scientific research is largely concentrated around the agricultural faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, alongside institutes within the Agricultural Research Organisation (ARO), and the research arm of the Israeli Agriculture Ministry. According to the Global Agriculture Information Network Report (GAIN, download pdf) from the USDA, as of 2006, there had been no commercial production of genetically modified seeds in Israel. However, there is active research taking place – including field trials - on the development of genetically modified seeds with improved resistance to stress factors, diseases and herbicides, taking in tomatoes, potatoes, cotton, maize and bananas. In 2005, cultivated GM crop areas came to just 0.4 hectares, a decrease of 85% on 2004 (2.4 ha).

Biotech - one focus of German-Israeli research cooperation

With a large number of ongoing projects between the two countries, as far as economic relationships are concerned, Germany is by far the most important European partner for Israeli research efforts. A framework agreement laid down in an exchange of letters dating back to 1973 has provided a basis for German-Israeli cooperation between the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). In 1976, the area of biotechnology (DISNAT) was included in this framework, which since 2000 has been focused on funding application-oriented cooperation projects between Israeli research groups and German companies. In 2004, the BMBF and the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour (MOIT) and MOST in Jerusalem jointly kicked off the "German-Israeli Cooperation in Biotechnology - BIO-DISC", scheme, which is aimed at developing biotechnology know-how across the two countries in the form of new processes, products and services for transfer into industrial application. Close scientific German-Israeli relations have also existed for more than 30 years in the areas of cancer research and cardiovascular diseases.

Furthermore, joint projects are ongoing under the umbrella of the BMBF program BioChancePlus and within the framework of the European Commission’s ERA-NET programme. Close cooperation since 1998 in the field of neuroscience eventually led to the founding of the ERA-NET Neuron in 2007, which also includes Finland, France, Austria, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The ERA-NET Pathogenomics, which takes in German and Israeli researchers, and many other European partners, is similarly broad.

Alongside, there are exchange programs for doctoral and post-doctoral students between the Israeli Minerva centres and with the Weizmann Institute of Science and German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF). The GIF - very well known in both Germany and in Israel - is a funding organ for collaborative projects and in 2007 commanded funds totalling 210 million euros.

Not surprisingly, there are many diverse examples of successful joint projects in the various biotechnological fields. For example, in 2004, a German-Israeli research team led by Uri Gat of the Department of Cell and Animal Biology at the Silberman Institute of Life Sciences of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, alongside Thomas Scheibel at the Technical University of Munich, succeeded in the first synthetic creation of spiders’ thread that is designed to be much stronger than silk worm thread. These results have led to the founding of a company, supported in part by the BMBF’s bionics competition

Natural spider silk seen through an electron microscope.Source: AMSilk

Since 2001, Thomas Scheibel from the Technical University in Munich has been active in the field of bionics, in particular the study and synthetic creation of spider’s silk. His work has garnered him awards from the BMBF’s Bionics competition. Click here for more.

Also in the area of green biotechnology, German and Israeli scientists have made great advances in the field of ‘smart breeding’. Here, techniques in molecular biology and genetic engineering are optimised for plant breeding, without actually requiring the genetic modification of the plants. Researchers Alisdair Fernie and Lothar Willmitzer of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm and their Israeli colleagues under Dani Zamir of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are studying tomato lines that are based on the crossbreeding of farmed and wild tomatoes. This work has led to the discovery of 880 differences in the make up of the new breed in comparison to their parents (Nature Biotechnology, 2006, Issue 24, P. 447 - 454). The researchers took these findings and created a tomato with a very high sugar content that is now widely cultivated in the United States. The largest buyers of this new type of tomato are of course the ketchup manufacturers, because they then don’t require as much sugar in the form of glucose for their product. Meanwhile, the researchers have also identified regions in the tomato genome that are responsible for both good-tasting and healthy substances. Now, further tomato varieties being subjected to targeted studies following the discovery of these "tasty" regions.