Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences
Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences
The Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences is an independent research institute for biomedical sciences, working within the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology's Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. Its main mission is to promote excellence in biomedical research for the benefit of human health.
The Institute presently has four "Centers of Excellence": The Cardiovascular Research Center, The Cancer and Vascular Biology Research Center and The Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research Center, and The Population Genetics and PharmacoGenomics Research Center. A fifth Center of Excellence, The Alzheimer’s Research Center, will be established in the near future.
Detailed information can be found here.
Coordinator Prof. Amir Orian
Prof. Amir Orian was born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1964. He received his MD (1999), and PhD in biochemistry (2000) from the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. During his graduate studies, and under the supervision of Professor Aaron Ciechanover, he investigated the role of the ubiquitin system in the regulation of the immune response. Specifically, he studied the mechanisms involved in the limited proteolytic processing of the NF-kB precursor p105 molecule, as well as signal induced degradation of the NF-kB inhibitor IkB. For his Post-doctoral training, he joined the lab of Dr. Robert Eisenman at the Fred Hutchinson Research Cancer. As a Post-doctoral fellow, he studied the regulation and mode of action of the Myc oncogene, which is intimately involved in leukemias, lymphomas, and myeloma. Amir has been a member of the Rappaport Research Institute since 2005, and is a visiting associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle WA. He is also a board member of the SingGene-MDC-Berlin/Technion/Hebrew-University International graduate program. Amir’s current research is aimed at understanding the function and regulation of transcriptional networks in development and cancer. Furthermore, the lab is using the fly system as a novel platform for in vivo drug discovery. One clear advantage of this approach is the ability to rapidly translate findings emerging from the fly system to relevant human cancers. During his MD/PhD studies, he received the Wolf Foundation Award, and the Clore Excellence Fellowship, as well as the Fulkes Fellowship for MD/PhD. He is a recipient of the Alon-ISF Fellowship for young scientists, and the HFSP-CDA Award. He is a special fellow of the Lymphomas and Leukemia Society, a Technion-Horev fellow, and a recipient of the 2007 Krill Award for outstanding young scientists.
