Recently AFTAU hosted an informative evening with experts from the Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Professors Abed Azem and Dan Peer.

We learnt from Professor Azem about the breadth of the Faculty of Life Sciences and the impact the Faculty’s students, academics and researchers have made across the globe.

On that note, we congratulate PhD candidate, Tom Shlesinger and Prof. Yossi Loya from the Faculty of Life Sciences on their recently published paper in Science, the world’s leading scientific journal where they were also awarded the prized front cover.

As Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences, Prof. Abed Azem was particularly proud to see this paper as he says “it is a real achievement, not only from the scientific point of view but also as it is not every day only two authors (the student and the supervisor) publish a Science paper.”

Prof. Dan Peer’s enlightened the audience with a presentation on cancer and inflammatory diseases including how the cannabis plant and its derivative compounds have been shown to relieve the symptoms of these diseases.

He inspired us on how the harnessing of nanoparticles to deliver drugs directly into the body’s cells has the potential to transform cancer therapy. It is remarkable to think that these “nano-carriers” loaded with cannabinoids have been observed to shrink tumours and cancerous cells in animal models.