Recipients 2006

Future Time Dimension - Cancer Therapy

 

Blum Roy

Personal Details:
Dept. of Neurobiochemistry - TAU
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Title of Research:
"Studies on the Mechanism of Action of the Proto-oncogene Ras in Human Glioblastoma: New Approaches to Brain Tumor Therapy"
Summary of Research, July 2006

 

 

Mann-Steinberg Hagit

Personal Details:
Dept. of Physiology and Pharmacology - Sackler School of Medicine, TAU
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Title of Research:
"Inhibition of the Angiogenic Switch of Pancreatic Cancer"

August 2006

Angiogenesis, the formation of capillaries from preexisting blood vessels, is now considered to be a key point for tumor growth. There is a large body of evidence that solid tumors depend on angiogenesis for growth beyond a size of 1-2 mm3. As a result, the microvascular endothelial cell, recruited by the tumor, has become an important second target in cancer therapy. Therefore, one of the most promising treatment approaches today involves the concept of angiogenesis inhibition.
TNP-470 is a synthetic angiogenesis inhibitor that was tested recently as an antiangiogenic/anticancer agent. TNP-470 has shown promise in clinical trials, however, doses necessary for tumor regression, showed signs of neurotoxicity. We recently described the synthesis and characterization of a novel non-toxic, water-soluble N-(2-hydroxypropyl)methacrylamide (HPMA) copolymer-TNP-470 conjugate, named caplostatin. Conjugation of TNP-470 to HPMA copolymer prolonged the circulating lifetime of the drug and increased its accumulation in angiogenic tissue such as the tumor vascular bed. Furthermore, caplostatin was unable to cross the blood brain barrier (BBB), eliminating its neurotoxicity.
In order to improve the therapeutic index of caplostatin even further we propose to add to this conjugate a targeting moiety such as RGD that will actively target it to the proliferating endothelial cells in the tumor surrounding. We plan to test this novel conjugate and its ability to inhibit angiogenesis on several mouse models and to elucidate its mechanism of action.

 

 

Nevo Ido

Personal Details:
Department of Cell Research and Immunology - TAU
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Title of Research:
"The Involvement of Fractalkine in Bone-Marrow-Endothelium Transmigration of Neuroblastoma Cells"
Summary of Research, December 2006

 

 

Schayek Hagit

Personal Details:
Dept. of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry - TAU
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Title of Research:
"Analysis of Insulin-like Growth Factor-I Receptor Gene Transcription in Prostate Cancer"
Summary of Research, July 2006

 

 

Tirro Elena

Personal Details:
Dept. of Biomedical Science - University of Catania
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Title of Research:
"Role of Inhibitor of Apoptosis Proteins in the Resistance to Cytotoxic and Biological Agents of Solid and Hematological Malignances"
Summary of Research, July 2006

 

 

Yacoby Iftach

Personal Details:
Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, TAU
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Title of Research:
"Targeted Drug Carrying Viruses"

August 2006
Bacteriophages have been used for over a century for Lab tool and (unorthodox) therapy of bacterial infections. Here I present a novel application of filamentous bacteriophages (phages) as targeted drug carriers for the eradication of cancer or (pathogenic) bacteria. The phages are genetically-modified to display the antibody Fc-binding ZZ domain of protein A as a fusion protein to the minor phage coat protein III, which enables the phage to from a stable complex with target-specific IgG's. In addition, the phages are used to deliver a large payload (about 10,000 drug molecules/phage) of the cytotoxic drug doxorubicin for cancer or chloramphenicol for pathogenic bacteria.

The drug is linked to the phages by a cleavable peptide or ester bond (respectively) subject to controlled release by lysosomal cathepsin or serum esterases (respectively). The large carrying capacity of such a hydrophobic drugs was made possible by our linking the drugs to the phage coat through aminoglycosides that served as solubility-enhancing, branched linkers. In the conjugated state the drug is in fact a pro-drug devoid of cytotoxic activity and is activated following its release from the phage at the target site. Our model targets are the breast cancer Erb2 and the following pathogenic bacteria: the Gram positive, MRSA Staphylococcus aureus COL ; Streptococcus pyogenes and the Gram negative E.coli O78 (781) bacteria.

I demonstrated a complete inhibition of growth in all of them, and a potency improvement by factor of ~10,000 in comparison to free doxorubicin or chloramphenicol. This approach replaces the selectivity of the drug itself with target selectivity born by the targeting moiety, which may allow the use and re-introduction of "non-specific" drugs that have thus far been excluded from use (due to toxicity or low selectivity). The re-introduction of such drugs into the useful arsenal of tools may help to combat cancer and the emerging bacterial antibiotic resistance.

 

 

Yoeli-Lerner Merav

Personal Details:
Dept. of Pathology - Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School, USA
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Title of Research:
"The PI3K-Akt/PKB Signaling Pathway in Human Breast Carcinoma Invasion"
Abstract, September 2006

 

 

Zipin Adi

Personal Details:
Department of Cell Research and Immunology, TAU
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Title of Research:
"Interactions between Chemokines and their Receptors in Colorectal Carcinoma: The CXCL10-CXCR3 Axis"
Summary of Research, July 2006

Present Time Dimension - Journalists of Print Media

 

Davidson Roei

Personal Details:
Department of Communication - TAU
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Title of Research:
"The Development of Business News Journalism in Emerging and Developed Economies"
September 2006
My Post-doctoral project examines how the social and political organization of the economy impacts news organizations, building on recent work that has examined the interaction between politics and the media from a comparative perspective.
I will use the rise of the business press generally and the Israeli business press specifically as an illustrative empirical example. I will argue that changes in the economy's configuration influence the communication needs of members of the audience (as workers, consumers and investors). Such changes result in the development of novel news genres such as the business press. In parallel, business news organizations as cultural institutions sometimes serve as focal points for the development of new political-economic ideas that later spread beyond the confines of the business press. This is a second aspect of news institutions I will examine.

 

 

Gursel Zeynep

Personal Details:
Dept. of Anthropology - University of California, Berkeley, USA
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Title of Research:
"The Image Industry: The Work of International News Images in the Age of Digital Reproduction"

August 2006
Against the backdrop of Gulf War II, commonly referred to as "the most photographed war in history," I have spent the last two years engaged in ethnographic investigation of key nodal points of production, distribution, and circulation of the international photojournalism industry by focusing on its centers of power in New York and Paris.

In fall 2006 I will have completed the first extensive ethnography of the international news photography industry. My work builds on an increasingly rich anthropology of globalization and mass media that emphasizes the central role of the imagination in the production of culture and identity. Rather than analyze a single object of mass media, my dissertation documents the network through which international news photographs "move" to understand the structural limitations and possibilities that shape these images and their use in contemporary "ways of worldmaking."

This perspective makes explicit news photographs' role as images with which we construct our image of the world at large. News photography as a case study contributes to anthropological writing on the unevenness of the benefits of globalization because the structures that enable constructing images of various populations are almost all owned by "the West" and news publications in "the rest" of the world have few, if any, alternative sources of images. I aim to contribute to understanding how certain essentializing images of specific populations get reproduced and reinforced.

 

 

Iqani Mehitabel

Personal Details:
Department of Media & Communications London School of Economics & Political Science
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Title of Research:
"Branding, the Aestheticisation of Consumption and the Glossy Magazine"
Summary of Research, June 2007

 

 

Kobanyai Janos

Personal Details:
Department of Jewish History - Hebrew University, Israel
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Title of Research:
"Creating Jewish Culture in Hungary: Jozsef Patai and his Periodical Mult es Jovo (Past and Future), 1911-1944"
Summary of Research, October 2006

 

 

Shalev Shirley

Personal Details:
Department of Communication - TAU
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Title of Research:
"Advanced Reproductive Biotechnologies: The Contribution of Public Debate in the Media to the Politics of Reproduction in Israel"
Summary of Research, December 2007

 

 

Steir-Livny Liat

Personal Details:
The Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies - TAU
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Title of Research:
"A World of Difference: The Representation of the Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors and their Rehabilitation in the Films and Journalism of Zionist Organizations in Eretz-Israel and the USA"

This research analyses the representation of the Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, and their rehabilitation process and reintegration into society, as reflected in the cinema and journalism of Zionist organizations in Eretz-Israel and the United States between 1945-1948. The research will show that the socio-cultural differences between Eretz-Israel and the United States resulted in differing representations of the Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, and their rehabilitation. The newsletters and films, many of them rare and hitherto un-researched, indicate that the narratives created in Eretz-Israel and the United States by journalists and film makers, while dealing with the same subjects (European Jews, The Diaspora, Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, the settlers of the land of Israel, the British Mandate, Arabs, and Eret- Israel) did so in very different ways.

Past Time Dimension - Preserving Cultural Heritage

 

Alkhateeb-Shehada Housni

Personal Details:
Department of Zoology - TAU
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Title of Research:
"Veterinary Medicine and Attitudes to Animals: The Heritage of Medieval Islam"
Summary of Research, September 2006

 

 

Cholcman Tamar

Personal Details:
Art History Dept, The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of Art - TAU
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Title of Research:
"RECONSTRUCTING A FORGOTTEN CULTURE: EPHEMERAL ART IN SPAIN, PORTUGAL AND FLANDERS IN THE 17TH CENTURY"
Summary of Research, July 2006

 

 

Ferber Ilit

Personal Details:
Fulbright Visiting Scholar, German Dept., Princeton University, USA
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Title of Research:
"Walter Benjamin: Heritage as an Ethical Encounter with the Past"
July 2006
Walter Benjamin: Heritage as an Ethical Encounter with the Past
How is the concept of heritage related to the nature of the encounter between past and present? What is the nature of this encounter? In what sense is there a commitment involved in this encounter? In my post-doctoral research, I intend to inquire into these questions in Walter Benjamin's writings, which raise, I claim, these significant concerns and propose an illuminating perspective upon them.

My doctoral dissertation deals with the concept of melancholy and its role in Benjamin's writings. I argue that melancholy serves Benjamin as a model and motivation for his philosophical and historical work. I claim that melancholy being a response to an unacceptable, almost denied loss, can be seen as a basis for the construction of an ethical relation between the past and the present. This ethical commitment is reflected in Benjamin's inquiries into the German baroque theatrical genre of sorrow-plays, the Trauerspiel. In this work, Benjamin conceives this genre as lost, neglected, misunderstood by critiques and almost absent from the history of theater of the time. This historical exclusion is the basis upon which Benjamin builds his philosophical and historical exploration of the genre.

I will present Benjamin's contribution to our understanding of heritage, through the way in which he conceives his own philosophical encounter with the Trauerspiel, which existed two centuries before his own time. For Benjamin, heritage and the re-understanding of the Trauerspiel are never detached from one's own present, and are always entangled with it. The ethical commitment that motivates this encounter leads to a reading of the Trauerspiel as intended for the present from which it is read. Benjamin writes that the past can only be seized by an image that flits-by the present - it must be recognized at the instance in which it flashes. The description of the encounter as a "recognition" is central to the understanding of Benjamin's conception of heritage. It alludes to the familiar nature of the past, its echoing within us, rather than being external to us. We should not recuperate the past because of its distance, but because of its familiarity to us. If not seized, this moment of encounter will be lost for the present. This moment is irretrievable, writes Benjamin, thus stressing the commitment to the passage of heritage, which is again - never a mere re-turning to the past, but instead always a committed encounter on behalf of the present. There is a moment in which the past is turning to the present, and the present recognizes that call and should seize this moment in which heritage unfolds. In this sense, Benjamin stresses that the crucial question is not where the past belongs to, but rather, its intersection and recuperation in the present.

 

 

Furstenberg Ariel

Personal Details:
The School of Philosophy and The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas - TAU
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Title of Research:
"The Languages of Talmudic Discourse: A Philosophical Study of the Evolution of Amoraic Halakha"
Summary of Research, August 2006

 

 

Lebovic Nitzan

Personal Details:
Dept. of History - University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA
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Title of Research:
"Hugo Bergmann and the German-Jewish Image of Life"
At the center of my post-doctoral study is Hugo Bergman, eventually the first rector of Hebrew University and among the founders of the first Israeli peace group, "Brith Shalom." Among his close friends one finds not only Franz Kafka and Martin Buber, but also Emil Utitz, Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, Hans Kohn, and, later, Jacob Taubes, Gershom Scholem, and Salomon Friedrich Rothschild.

In the letters exchanged by the members of this group one finds many topics then virtually taboo, such as political theology, anti-Freudian psychology, aesthetic typology, and the radical Lebensphilosophie [Life-Philosophy]. Many of these issues were identified during the 1950s with the intellectual streams that supported the German right wing of the 1920s.

Surprisingly, much of the counter-discussion took place within the boundaries and concern for Jewish studies, and later for the Israeli politics of the 1950s, or rather its humanist alternative. Using theology as a tool for political reform, Bergman tried to convince David Ben Gurion and Geulah Cohen, among others, in the new radical horizons his Jewish political theology developed.

Future Plans:
I hope to find a position and finish the dissertation manuscript I was working on, for publication (From Philosophy of Life to Philosophy of Death: Ludwig Klages's Lebensphilosophie, defended at UCLA, Summer of 2005).

 

 

Schnitzer-Maimon Merav

Personal Details:
The School of History - TAU
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Title of Research:
"Sexual Violence toward Women in the German and French Jewish Communities of the 11th to 14th Centuries"
Summary of Research, September 2006

 

 

Wilf Eitan

Personal Details:
Dept. of Anthropology - The University of Chicago, USA
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Title of Research:
"The Cultural Reproduction of Jazz Music in Professional Schools"
Summary of Research, August 2006