By Steve Bryan

Tissue engineered heart valve. Photo credit Hia

A delegation of sixty top British academics visited Israel last week, to launch a groundbreaking program to promote collaboration between the two countries in regenerative medicine, through the first UK-Israel Regenerative Medicine Conference.

Over 250 people attended the conference at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev on November 22-23, 2011.  The millions of people who suffer from major trauma, heart disease and Parkinson’s disease stand to benefit from this first-ever joint gathering of British and Israeli specialists in this field.

The conference is the inaugural event of the BIRAX (the Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership) Regenerative Medicine Initiative, a five-year program which aims to raise $15.5 million and will give generous support to fifteen joint high quality UK-Israel research initiatives. The projects will be selected by an expert panel and approved by the UK-Israel Life Sciences Council.

Professor Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, welcomed the attendees.  “The conference attracted many more participants than we ever anticipated,” said Carmi, who praised the program of the conference and the decision to focus on the area of regenerative medicine.

Ambassador Matthew Gould. Photo credit Mati Milstein, Courtesy of The British Council.

British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould noted, “Both the UK and Israel have disproportionate numbers of the world’s top universities, we both have disproportionate numbers of Nobel prize winners, we’ve both got amazing labs doing extraordinary things at the cutting edge of almost every field. But in my eyes, there isn’t the level of collaboration between British and Israeli scientists that there could be. There is a lot of fantastic collaboration going on, but it’s not anywhere near its full potential.”

Gould hopes the next five years of the BIRAX initiative “will forge partnerships that can last, laying a foundation for an Israeli-British partnership in regenerative medicine that over time can become a real global force.”

Israel and the UK are both recognized as world leaders in the area of regenerative medicine – the field of medicine which aims to restore the function of tissues and organs using a variety of approaches, including cell therapy, tissue engineering, gene therapy and biomedical engineering.

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