Investing in Precision Medicine

Dudi Baum, BSc is a serial entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in the semiconductors/communication industry, driving strategies, partnerships and building successful business from the start to hundreds of millions in sales. He is the founder of CopperGate, which was acquired by Sigma Designs in 2009 and Sckipio which was acquired by Sequans in 2020. Dudi served 8 years as the CEO of Sckipio and 12 years as senior leader at CopperGate/ Sigma Designs (VP Business Development, VP Marketing and VP Corporate Development). Over the years Dudi built deep relationship with tier one customers like Motorola, Cisco, Nokia, Intel, AT&T that were translated into strategic partnerships/investments and hundreds of millions in sales. From 1992 until 1999 he served in R&D leading positions of digital signal processing, software and hardware at Orckit (a pioneer in broadband technologies) and Motorola (mobile devices). David has a BsC in electrical engineering from the Ben-Gurion University – Israel.

Jonathan Medved is the Founder and CEO of OurCrowd. Named by the Washington Post as “one of Israel’s leading high tech venture capitalists” and by the New York Times among the “top 10 most influential Americans who have impacted Israel,” Jon is a serial entrepreneur and investor, and one of the pioneers of Israel’s venture capital industry. Jon is a regular television guest on CNN, BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg TV and SkyNews, and is frequently quoted in major business publications. Start-up Nation, the best-selling book on Israel’s high-tech economy, describes him as “one of Israel’s legendary business ambassadors.” A California native, Jon moved to Israel in his 20s where he successfully built and exited several startups. These include MERET Optical Communications, a fiber optics pioneer sold to Amoco; multilingual leader Accent Software (Nasdaq: ACNTF); and mobile video platform Vringo (NYSE:VRNG). In 1994, Jon was a co-founder of Israel Seed Partners, one of Israel’s first venture capital funds. Including the OurCrowd portfolio, Jon has backed over 400 tech startups as a venture capitalist and angel investor.

Ofer Sharon, M.D. is a physician and entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in clinical research, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, and has made vital contributions to the acceleration of personalized medicine and oncology drug development. He is the CEO of OncoHost, a global leader in next-generation precision oncology for improved personalized cancer therapy.

Aaron Ciechanover was born in Haifa, Israel in 1947.  He is currently a Distinguished Research Professor in the Faculty of medicine at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.  He received his M.Sc. (1971) and M.D. (1973) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He then completed his national service (1973-1976) as military physician, and continued his studies to obtain a doctorate in biological sciences in the Faculty of Medicine in the Technion (D.Sc.; 1982).  There, as a graduate student with Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin A. Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, USA, they discovered that covalent attachment of ubiquitin to a target protein signals it for degradation.  They deciphered the mechanism of conjugation, described the general proteolytic functions of the system, and proposed a model according to which this modification serves as a recognition signal for a specific downstream protease.  As a post- doctoral fellow with Dr. Harvey Lodish at the M.I.T., he continued his studies on the ubiquitin system and made additional important discoveries.  Along the years it has become clear that ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis plays major roles in numerous cellular processes, and aberrations in the system underlie the pathogenetic mechanisms of many diseases, among them certain malignancies and neurodegenerative disorders.  Consequently, the system has become an important platform for drug development.  Among the numerous prizes Ciechanover received are the 2000 Albert Lasker Award, the 2002 EMET Prize, the 2003 Israel Prize, and the 2004 Nobel Prize (Chemistry; shared with Drs. Hershko and Rose).  Among many academies, Ciechanover is member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Foreign Fellow), the American Philosophical Society, the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) and Medicine (NAM) of the USA (Foreign Associate), the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; Foreign Member), the Russian Academy of Sciences (Foreign Member), and the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina).    

Ophir is a parallel successful entrepreneur.

Currently, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sequentify, a DNA sequencing company from Weizmann. Previously, he was the Founder and Chairman of Jungo, a spinoff from Cisco, automotive AI software (IPO TLV:Jungo).

Ophir was the GM at Jungo (acquired by NDS $107m); and then became an Executive at NDS which later was acquired by Cisco for $5B. He was the founder of Mathtools, MATLAB where he was the CEO of compilers, It was later acquired by MathWorks. Ophir holds a B.Sc in Electrical Engineering (cumma sum laude) from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. World-class Bridge player, european (bridge) and world champion (mind games/bridge).

Dr. Liran Shlush received his BSc with honor from Technion Institute of Technology Haifa Israel in 1996. He completed his medical degree also in the Technion and his Internal Medicine and at the Rambam Healthcare Campus Haifa Israel. Dr. Shlush completed a PhD in population’s genetics in 2012, at the Technion Faculty of Medicine Haifa Israel under the supervision of Prof. Karl Skorecki. He has been a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. John Dick in Toronto from 2012-2014.During this time he published a seminal paper in Nature on the early evolution of leukemia, a paper that was selected by the editors of Nature medicine as one of the most notable advancement in medicine for the year of 2014.Later in 2017 Dr. Shlush together with the group of Dr. Dick published a formal proof to the role of leukemia stem cells in AML relapse.These findings hold great promise for the treatment of AML as it is becoming clearer which cells need to be eliminated in order to control the relapsing clones at least in a subset of AML cases.Dr Shlush joined in 2018 as a senior scientist at the immunology department at theWIS and a visiting physician in the leukemia group atPrincess Margaret Cancer Centre, and theHematology department at the Rambam healthcare campus with continued clinical activity in the field of Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and other pre leukemic conditions.At the WISDr. Shlush research was focused on the evolution of hematological malignancies with special interest in the early stages of leukemia. In 2018 Dr Shlush group (in collaboration with Dr. Vassiliou Groupr from the Sanger Institute) published in Nature the first manuscript describing the early diagnosis of AML, years before its current diagnosis. This paper has opened the possibility for prevention of AML.Together with Dr. Abdel-Waheb from Memorial Sloan Kettering Dr. Shlush group developed and patented treatments for the prevention of AML and MDS and the first ever clinical trial for AML/MDS prevention before diagnosis is going to be lunched in 2019. Dr. Shlush group has further developed algorithms to predict AML based on electronic health records also published in Nature 2018, such algorithms will allow us to narrow down the population at risk for AML and bring the vision of AML prevention into practice.