2021 ANNUAL REPORT | Bar-Ilan Institute of Nanotechnology & Advanced Materials

Fusing Life Sciences, Bioengineering and Exact Sciences Prof. Yossi Mandel’s lab draws research students from different fields, including the life sciences and biomedical engineering, neurobiology and neuroscience, vision science and chemistry, as well as MD postdocs. “To diversify our expertise even more, we collaborate with other labs and scientists in the life sciences and exact sciences,” says Prof. Mandel. The remarkable potential and novelty of such research collaborations are evident in his recent work with BINA faculty Prof. Zeev Zalevsky, the dean of the BIU’s Alexander Kofkin Faculty of Engineering and a prolific inventor whose research spans optics, nanophotonics and physics. And the Blind Shall See One in 4,000 people worldwide suffers from genetic diseases causing blindness (the rate in Israel’s population is more than double) and many more are affected by age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss for older adults in the Western world. With life expectancy rising, this situation poses a growing challenge. “Our hybrid retinal implant is a novel approach for meeting this challenge,” says Prof. Mandel. “In AMD, for example, the photoreceptor cells—light-sensing cells—in the retina of blind people are dead, but other retinal layers, those that process the visual data into neural electrical impulses and transmit them to the brain to create visual perception, are relatively preserved. By replacing the damaged photoreceptor cells, we hope to be able to restore blind people’s vision and most importantly, give them more natural vision than what existing devices can give. Bioconvergence Accelerating Medical and Life-altering Innovation 39

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