When Israeli Innovation Becomes a Global Lifeline
For anyone who has faced a cancer diagnosis, or watched someone they love go through one, there is a particular anguish that comes with uncertainty. For me, that feeling is deeply personal. My father, an engineer whose love of science and engineering is part of what ultimately brought me to the Technion, went through multiple cancer diagnoses. I know what it is like to watch someone you love confront the questions that come with cancer.
With early-stage breast cancer, the first steps can be relatively clear: testing, diagnosis, and surgery. But then comes a much harder question: Should I undergo chemotherapy?
It is an intensely personal decision. Chemotherapy can be lifesaving for patients who benefit from it. But for others, it may bring significant physical and emotional consequences without improving their outcomes. Many of my closest friends have gone through breast cancer treatment, and I have seen firsthand the toll it can take.
That uncertainty is precisely the kind of problem science should help us solve.
And today, Technion researchers are using artificial intelligence to bring us closer to an answer.
In previous posts, I have written about the importance of translating Israel’s extraordinary innovation into something larger than a source of pride. For those of us engaged in Jewish philanthropy, our challenge is to show how discoveries emerging from Israel can improve someone’s life anywhere on Earth.
A new breakthrough in breast cancer care offers a powerful example.
From a Difficult Question to a Better Answer
Technion researchers, working with international medical collaborators, have developed an AI model designed to predict both the risk that early-stage breast cancer will return and whether a patient is likely to benefit from chemotherapy.
What makes the approach especially compelling is that it analyzes routine pathology images already taken from tumor tissue when a patient is diagnosed.
Doctors can use genomic tests such as Oncotype DX to help make chemotherapy decisions, but those tests are costly, can take weeks to return results, and are not accessible to many patients around the world. The Technion researchers asked whether information already contained in an ordinary pathology sample could provide another path.
Using deep learning, the model identifies patterns within the tumor and surrounding tissue, including signals associated with cell division, tissue structure, immune response, and sensitivity or resistance to treatment. It brings these clues together to produce a score reflecting recurrence risk and the expected benefit of chemotherapy.
And it can do so in minutes, using tissue that already exists.
Think about what that could mean for a patient.
Instead of enduring weeks of uncertainty, a woman and her physician could have another powerful piece of information much sooner, helping her make an evidence-informed decision about whether chemotherapy is likely to help.
At its best, technology is not really about technology. It is about giving people better choices.
An impressive prediction in a laboratory is one thing. Demonstrating that it can meaningfully inform medicine is another.
The researchers were granted access to data from TAILORx, one of the largest randomized breast cancer trials, involving more than 10,000 patients. Because patients had been randomly assigned to chemotherapy or no chemotherapy and followed over time, researchers could compare the AI model’s predictions with actual outcomes.
The AI identified patients who benefited from chemotherapy, while also identifying large groups, particularly postmenopausal women, who did not benefit and could safely avoid treatment. Its performance was comparable to widely used genomic tests.
The model was also tested using patient data from hospitals across Israel, the United States, Australia, and Europe, with performance remaining consistent across populations, equipment, and health care systems.
A discovery may begin in a Technion laboratory in Israel. But its relevance does not end at Israel’s borders.
This month, that relevance feels particularly immediate. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an international effort to raise awareness, encourage early detection, and support people affected by the disease. Pink is everywhere, a reminder of how many lives breast cancer touches. But awareness matters most when accompanied by progress: better tools, better access, and better choices.
From Pride to Access
This is where the story becomes particularly important for those of us in Jewish philanthropy.
We often speak about Israel as the Startup Nation. We celebrate its scientists, entrepreneurs, physicians, and engineers, and rightly so. But admiration alone is not enough. We have to ask: Who benefits?
Breast cancer affects approximately 2.3 million people worldwide each year, yet access to sophisticated diagnostic tools is not distributed equally. Genomic testing can cost thousands of dollars and remains unavailable to many patients in low- and middle-income countries.
The greater promise of this Technion-developed approach may be that personalized cancer care could become accessible where today’s tests are out of reach.
Prof. Dvir Aran, a coleader of the study, put the implications plainly: in developing countries, the technology could dramatically expand access to personalized cancer care, while in wealthier countries it could reduce costs, shorten diagnosis time, and improve decision accuracy.
Having traveled to India several times for work, I was excited to learn that this international research team is now moving its work closer to the clinic, preparing trials in Brazil and India while exploring how the approach could be extended to additional treatments and cancers.
That global dimension resonates deeply with me. I have spent much of my career working to advance healthcare and alleviate poverty in countries where access to care cannot be taken for granted, and I have traveled to India many times. A large part of what makes me tick professionally is the belief that where someone lives should not determine whether she has access to healthcare or the opportunity to live a healthier life. That is why I love that the Technion is advancing science while creating the possibility of helping women around the world.
That is the journey we need to help donors see. Israel to Brazil. Israel to India. Israel to the United States. Israeli knowledge translated into human possibility.
Philanthropy Without Borders
Jewish philanthropy has always understood that we have responsibilities to one another. But I believe our philanthropic imagination can, and should, reach even further.
Supporting an Israeli institution and working toward global human progress are not competing ideas. Increasingly, they are intertwined.
When donors support the ecosystem that enables researchers to ask difficult questions, take intellectual risks, bring disciplines together, and turn discoveries into practical solutions, the effects can extend far beyond the original gift.
A donor may never meet the researchers whose work they help make possible. They may never meet the physician who uses that research. And they almost certainly will never meet the patient, perhaps thousands of miles away, who learns that she can safely avoid chemotherapy.
But the connection is real.
The most compelling story of Israeli innovation is not simply that something extraordinary was invented in Israel. It is what happens next: where that idea travels, who gains access to it, and whose life becomes healthier or more hopeful because someone believed the research was worth supporting.
Research like this gives that idea human form. Somewhere in the world, a woman will face one of the most frightening decisions of her life. If innovation born in Israel can help give her a clearer answer, then Israel’s impact is no longer an abstraction.
It is personal. For my friends, for families everywhere who have confronted cancer, and for my own family.
And helping make that kind of progress possible is philanthropy at its most meaningful.
