Israeli university secures $1.3 million research grant to help in global fight against polio

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Israel's Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Beersheva received new $1.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and validate a novel and safe approach for measuring immune responses to polioviruses.

Prof. Tomer Hertz of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics and the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev (NIBN) will lead the research. Beginning in 2018, Hertz has been developing antigen arrays capable of predicting the immune responses of patients vaccinated against polioviruses, influenza viruses or viruses from the flavivirus family, which also include Zika and other viruses that cause dengue and yellow fever.

In the 1950s, a vaccine to prevent paralysis caused by a poliovirus infection was developed. As a result, two of the three strains of the poliovirus have already been eradicated worldwide.

BGU announced the new funding for Hertz and his team "to apply and optimize PAM – a polio antigen microarray – that was originally developed using research grants from the WHO-coordinated Polio Research Committee. PAM requires only minimal amounts of serum or dried blood spots. Its validation will facilitate rapid analysis of blood samples in countries where polio has yet to be eradicated.”

“This is a very exciting opportunity to test our PAM assay on a large set of samples from a serosurvey conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” said Hertz.

“We hope that this project will lead to the establishment of a novel and safe to use the assay for measuring protection from polio infection,” he added.

Efforts to eradicate polio are supported by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a public-private partnership led by the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, UNICEF, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Gavi, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The CEO of BGN Technologies Josh Peleg, a tech-transfer company of Ben-Gurion University, praised Hertz, saying the professor "is an excellent example of an outstanding researcher who developed a groundbreaking platform technology which will have a global impact.”

It is not the first time that BGU scientists have gained the spotlight for their innovation and expertise.

In April, a team of Israeli researchers from BGU announced that they had developed a new method to kill liver colorectal cancer (CRC) metastases with the innovative use of nanosized polymers as deliveries for a chemotherapy drug. The research team presented evidence that the use of polymers could also reduce metastasis of melanoma in the lung region.

In February 2023, Israeli scientists at Ben-Gurion University discovered a breakthrough in the potential treatment of Alzheimer’s disease by proposing targeting the disease’s metabolic components.