Prof. Gur Yaari is a true multidisciplinarian. After serving in the elite 8200 intelligence unit, he made an adventurous leap into an acting career before going back to his main interest: the exact sciences and computational fields. Then, during his postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, he dived into the worlds of biology and medicine, going on to specialize in computational systems biology. Motivated by his desire to advance biomedical research and deliver innovative medical solutions, Prof. Yaari established his data-driven experimental laboratory for computational systems immunology at BIU’s Alexander Kofkin Faculty of Engineering, basing his work on the bioconvergence approach. Prof. Yaari collaborates with numerous colleagues worldwide and heads a broad European consortium of 20 research teams that develop infrastructure and computational methods for accessing and analyzing immune repertoire genomic sequences. Meanwhile, if you look closely, you can still catch him moonlighting on your small screen. Fusing Biology with Computational Tools Prof. Yaari and his research partners have already demonstrated that they can diagnose celiac, hepatitis C virus (HCV), COVID-19, bowel cancer and Crohn’s disease using machine-learning methods on patients’ adaptive immune repertoire sequences. In collaborative research, Prof. Yaari and Prof. Meital Gal-Tanamy of BIU’s Azrieli Faculty of Medicine studied biological samples of a small group of people infected with HCV. “First, we were able to identify a signature in the immune repertoire that allows us to predict whether a patient will recover spontaneously or need treatment—an expensive medication that is beyond the means of many. We have provided a kind of diagnostic tool,” says Prof. Yaari. Using BINA’s advanced equipment and expertise, the researchers aspire to design a chip containing this signature that can automatically detect the signature in a large group of HCV patients. For this diagnostic tool to be commercially viable, it must be affordable while maintaining the great precision the scientists have achieved in their research. “We took this study a step forward and studied the antibodies that were common to the patients who recovered spontaneously. Then, we produced an antibody similar to the one we found in them, that is, we expressed it from the genetic sequence. We then characterized our engineered antibody and were able to show that it can bind to HCV, neutralize it and stop it from continuing to spread and infect more body cells,” Prof. Yaari says. After having patented their antibody, Profs. Yaari and Gal-Tanamy are now on their way to putting it to clinical use. Following this success and the COVID-19 outbreak, they partnered with Prof. Tamir Tuller of Tel Aviv University and received two research grants, one from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the other from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), and showed their ability to diagnose the recent coronavirus in infected people from their immune repertoire. “We went on to test the repertoires of those who recovered well from COVID-19 with no complications, and now we are trying to characterize antibodies that can be candidates for production as an effective biological drug for immunocompromised people,” Prof. Yaari says. Despite the modest resources at their disposal, Prof. Yaari and his partners succeeded in creating a novel concept, based on the new coronavirus itself, that will be ready for use in the next epidemic, in the absence of an existing vaccine, and even as a vaccine replacement. Together—For the Greater Good Through these research projects, Prof. Yaari has gained valuable experience working with medical doctors and combining molecular biology and synthetic biology with computer science algorithms and machine-learning methods. “We now have experience with the entire antibody production pipeline: blood extraction, genetic sequencing, antibody selection and precise computational-method development. This knowledge will contribute to us and to the many scientists in both academia and pharmaceutical companies that are working to advance biological drugs, the main therapeutic approach today.” 42
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDU2MA==