A top-flight Israeli medical innovation centre has been crunching the development of leading edge COVID-19 related health projects from years down to weeks, including a rapid test kit that will cost under a dollar a test.
When the pandemic hit Israel in February, Dr Eyal Zimlichman, the Deputy Director and Chief Innovation Officer at the world-famous Sheba Medical Centre in Tel Aviv found himself involved in an innovation “storm.”
“When Sheba ran into COVID back in late February, I call it the perfect storm, because from that point, on we’ve had an immense number of innovations, of patents and commercialisation of products,” said Dr Zimlichman.
Dr Zimlichman heads up Sheba Medical Centre’s ARC (Accelerate Redesign Collaborate) Innovation Centre which harnesses innovators, scientists, startups, high-level developers, large corporate companies, investors, and academia under one roof.
He will be speaking (virtually) on October 21 at the 2020 Australia Israel Innovation Summit in a session dealing with innovation and the global healthcare sector.
One of the innovations ARC has generated in the course of the pandemic is a new type of ventilator which was developed from scratch to full scale production in just over a month, rather than years.
The ventilator was developed in conjunction with an Israeli Army engineering unit., with a combined team of 150 people working at emergency pace.
Read the article by Stuart Kennedy in InnovationAus.