SpaceIL founder seeks to make cancer tests simpler

• Published date: 05 October 2021
• Author: ZEV STUB
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Winetraub is one of the co-founders of SpaceIL, the Israeli organization that attempted to land the spaceship Beresheet on the Moon in 2019.

On Tuesday, the US National Institutes of Health awarded him its prestigious Early Independence Prize to research a device that would be able to diagnose skin tumors without the need for invasive biopsies.

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"Right now, if a lesion on a person's skin is believed to be cancer, the most common way to confirm the diagnosis is using an invasive biopsy procedure in which the doctor cuts the piece of skin out with a knife and puts it under a microscope," Winetraub said. "The clinician looks at the sample and makes the diagnosis with a little bit of guesswork. The process is invasive, painful and leaves ugly scars."

Winetraub's solution, in contrast, would rely on optical imaging to generate a "virtual biopsy."

"The idea is very similar to that of an ultrasound, but instead of sounds, we use light to generate very high-resolution images that can see single cells inside the body up to one millimeter into the tissue," he said. "We use machine-learning technologies to compare these images to others for diagnosis, so we can achieve a higher level of accuracy as well."

The technology could also be used to diagnose brain tumors in a similar way, without unnecessarily cutting out brain tissue, Winetraub said.

Beyond its clinical benefits, the technique can also be used for research into tumor development and tumor responses to treatment by providing in-vivo images of healthy and tumorous tissue microstructures changing over time, allowing physicians to watch tumor growth.

Born in Israel, Winetraub has spent the past six years completing his PhD in biophysics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, with research focused on utilizing optical coherence tomography (OCT) and machine learning to create virtual histology tools to image cancer at a single-cell resolution.

Recognizing the potential impact of his research, Stanford nominated Winetraub for the NIH's Early Independence Prize, an exclusive grant with hundreds of...