In the past year, dozens of senior people in the biomedical field in Israel and the US have racked up a hundred days of meetings discussing ways of removing obstacles impeding Israel’s biomedical industry. The meetings yielded not only a report with recommendations, but also a concrete plan, the first stage of which is the setting up of a philanthropic fund for commercializing technologies from all the universities in Israel. The fund is intended to raise $500 million.
The initiative is led and will be chaired by Samuel Moed, until 2020 head of Corporate Strategy at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), who steered the company’s acquisition of Celgene. After leaving Bristol Myers Squibb, Moed focused on activity in Israel and became a venture partner at venture capital firm aMoon and joined the boards of several Israeli companies. He also volunteered in the 8400 Helix US-IL Task Force initiative, a network of senior people in Israel’s biotech sector, in the framework of which the series of meetings was held.
Moed recruited Dr. Anat Cohen-Dayag as CEO of the fund. Cohen-Dayag was highly respected as CEO of Israeli drug discovery company Compugen. She is currently the company’s chairperson, and will continue in that role at the same time as managing the fund.
Cooperation between competitors
Fifteen Israeli academic institutions have joined as partners in the initiative, in a display of cooperation between competitors. Among them are the Weizmann Institute of Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and Bar-Ilan University. They are joined by healthcare organizations such as Maccabi Healthcare Services and Clalit Health Services, and the Beilinson, Sheba, Ichilov, Shaare Zedek, Rambam, and Hadassah hospitals.
The non-profit initiative is called the Israel National Biotech Innovation Center (INBI), while the fund, a subsidiary, is called INBI Core. It will proactively identify projects in the universities that can lead the life sciences industry in Israel. After these projects undergo the usual process of commercialization in the universities (with which the fund will not compete), INBI will work on two tracks to bridge the gap between the academic stage and readiness for the commercial stage: setting up startup companies, and giving commercialization licenses to pharma companies.
The new initiative will make use of all the connections of the network of experts who set it up in order to reach prominent figures around the world to advise and mentor the companies, to obtain finance for them, and to connect them to the leading companies in their fields. In addition, the young companies will be able to benefit from the money that INBI is due to raise.
"During my career at BMS I learned to look at the whole value chain of innovation in life sciences in order to understand where the opportunities were, where the pain points were, where value is created and where value is destroyed," Moed told "Globes". "When I retired, six years ago, many senior people in the Israeli ecosystem consulted me, and the desire grew within me to use my background to help Israel. I realized that much stronger and more enduring cooperation was needed between Israel and the US, and we created the Helix project, in which forty senior people from the Israeli and US life sciences industries participated. We realized that there was huge potential in Israel’s academic institutions that we estimated was only half exploited."
People participated in Helix who had led similar projects in the past, says Moed, and he provides examples. "The people who set up the Broad Institute in Boston (a partnership between MIT, Harvard and other institutions, G. W.) and those who were part of the SPARK program at Stanford (a funding and mentorship program meant to help academics in the field to turn their inventions into something practical, G.W.). In addition, academics took part who explained why they thought their ideas had not been applied as they would have wished. In Israel, up to now, the institutions have operated independently, but particularly here it is clear that they do not have the size or the expertise to do it alone."
"Philanthropy will be the basis"
Cohen-Dayag describes what the organization’s day-to-day activity will look like. "We will work proactively and identify innovations that we believe can turn into leading products. A committee that we shall form will select them and produce a special plan for unlocking their value. If the technology transfer company has succeeded well in commercializing the project without us - that’s great. But they know that some of the projects sink in the growing gap between academia and industry."
You say that the initiative needs $500 million over ten years. Have you started to raise the money?
Moed: "To raise the money we had to show that we had the cooperation of the leading institutions and also a team that knows what it’s doing. We are know approaching philanthropists who want to promote human health and Israel. The government could be an important partner - the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economy and Labor, the Israel Innovation Authority. We’re liaising with them and talking about the possibility of them giving us top-up funding that will help the project to take off, but philanthropy will be the basis. Once there are successes, private capital will also find its way to our companies."
What is the initiative’s timetable
Cohen-Dayag: "We’ll announce the first companies to be selected in a year’s time."
Moed: "In a year’s time we’ll have companies, and money assured for a decade. From there on, we expect rapid results."
Law firm Gornitzky-GNY advised on the formation of the initiative and will continue to act for it.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 7, 2026.
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