The Media Line: ‘The Future of Health and Medicine Is Coming Faster Than You Think’—From Israeli Labs to Global Health Systems  

‘The Future of Health and Medicine Is Coming Faster Than You Think’—From Israeli Labs to Global Health Systems  

A delegation of US and international health leaders visited Israeli research institutions and startups to examine how scientific discovery is translated into scalable medical technologies  

By Gabriel Colodro / The Media Line  

The bus entered the campus of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot under a clear February sky. Only the visible damage to one of the buildings, still marked by the Iranian missile strike that had destroyed dozens of laboratories months earlier, interrupted the sense of routine. Some of those laboratories had been conducting research on cancer and other life-threatening diseases. 

“The future of health and medicine is coming faster than you think,” Dr. Daniel Kraft, founder of Exponential Medicine and a physician-scientist working at the intersection of technology and health care, told The Media Line. “It’s not the technology; it’s often the convergence of a new operating system for the future of health and medicine.” 

He argued that what distinguishes ecosystems like Israel’s is density and the proximity of AI, digital health, diagnostics, and clinical systems within a compact environment. That proximity accelerates iteration. “Health and medicine are a universal need and collecting point,” he said, suggesting that collaboration in health care often moves forward even when political relationships are strained. 

The nearly 40 health executives stepping off the bus were part of a joint delegation organized by Israel Tech Mission in collaboration with 8400 The Health Network, which is Israel’s national HealthTech ecosystem accelerator and global network of leading health sector leaders, dedicated to strengthening the country’s medical innovation ecosystem into a national growth engine and expanding its global reach. 

As the central HealthTech and Life Sciences ecosystem organization, 8400 The Health Network played a strategic role in shaping the agenda and connecting visiting global leaders with key stakeholders across the Israeli ecosystem.  

The program was designed to reflect both the current challenges and emerging opportunities facing the ecosystem, while identifying areas of shared strategic value and enabling long-term pathways for sustained investment, collaboration, and partnership. 8400 The Health Network also serves as a key organization supporting ongoing engagement within the ecosystem, helping translate initial connections into lasting relationships and continued strategic involvement. 

Beyond convening participants, 8400 The Health Network played a central role in shaping the week’s agenda, aligning meetings with the specific interests of attendees and activating leading figures across Israel’s health innovation landscape. Investors, founders, advisers, and operators from the United States and other markets came with a shared focus: to understand how discoveries developed in Israeli laboratories move from research benches into global health systems. 

As chairman and founder of Israel Tech Mission, David Siegel helped design the structure of the week. He described the program as an effort to expose participants not only to promising companies, but to the operating logic of the ecosystem itself. 

“We don’t bring people here just to see companies. We bring them here to understand how the system works,” he told The Media Line. For Siegel, the distinction matters. The objective is sustained engagement, relationships that continue developing long after the formal meetings conclude. 

The structure he outlined was executed in close coordination with David Nakar, the mission’s executive director, who oversaw the week’s logistics and aligned meetings across research institutions, hospitals, and startup offices. “Israel’s advantage isn’t just density of talent—it’s velocity,” Nakar told The Media Line. “But velocity needs channels. Delegations like this create structured pathways between founders, researchers, operators, and capital allocators. When those pathways are intentional, the distance between lab discovery and global patient impact shortens dramatically.” 

“I feel so proud and happy about what is occurring here and what’s coming out,” Al Kinel, a mission participant, told The Media Line. “I’m excited to be able to help take those innovations and get them out to the world and help let people learn about them.” 

Kinel works in health technology consulting and founded the firm Strategic Interests. He also leads the New York Israel Chamber of Commerce, which promotes commercial and research ties between Israel and the United States. Much of his work, he explained, centers on helping medical innovation move beyond early promise and into actual adoption within the US system. “There are people that are going to be supportive and helpful, and we will figure out how to work with them to help us be successful, and then there’s the undecided,” he said. “I want them to understand the value of the innovation of Israel and how it’s changing the world in tikkun olam [‘healing the world’].” 

He did not avoid the broader climate in which that effort takes place. “Unfortunately, we’re in a spot in a world where there are people who are going to hate us and will never want to listen,” he said. “That’s not our audience.” The focus, in his view, is on those open to evidence and collaboration. In that sense, exporting medical technology is not simply an economic activity. It becomes a form of engagement grounded in outcomes. “If we can align, we will probably be way more impactful than we each could in our own individual way,” he added. 

Where Kinel emphasized alignment, Sam Moed spoke about structure. 

As a member of the global board of 8400 The Health Network, Israel’s national HealthTech ecosystem accelerator, Moed described the organization’s work as operating along two tracks. “We are very focused on supporting and strengthening the health care system in Israel,” he told The Media Line, “but at the same time, we are building bridges globally.” 

For him, those bridges are practical. Israel generates a significant volume of early-stage medical innovation, but scaling requires access to global capital and markets. “The United States is the largest source of life sciences capital in the world,” he said. Without engagement with that ecosystem, promising technologies can stall before reaching patients. 

“I am very optimistic about the magnitude of disruptive innovation that is coming out of Israel,” Moed said. The ambition, he suggested, is not marginal improvement but positioning health care alongside cyber and defense as one of Israel’s defining pillars. “We want health care to be one of those pillars.” 

Local challenges, he added, often drive globally relevant solutions. Referring to trauma care and mental health innovation, Moed noted that lived experience has shaped technologies now attracting international interest. “Some of the innovation agenda is driven by the problems we face here,” he said. In that way, the country’s constraints have produced exportable expertise. 

Throughout the week, the delegation engaged with actors operating at every layer of Israel’s health system, from capital formation to clinical application. The program included sessions with venture capital leaders and life sciences investors, hospital-based innovation teams integrating digital tools into care delivery, early-stage founders building diagnostics and therapeutics platforms, and professionals working in trauma and mental health in the south following the events of October 7. Rather than centering on individual companies, the schedule exposed participants to the structural components of the ecosystem: academic research, clinical integration, capital formation, and resilience-driven innovation, and how those components interact. 

At the Weizmann Institute of Science, discussions centered on translational pathways. Researchers described designing studies backward from proof of concept and regulatory milestones, rather than forward from curiosity alone. 

In one of the smaller breakout sessions, a group met with Professor Ravid Straussman, a physician-scientist in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In his office, Straussman presented the arc of his research and how it has evolved into three startups focused on cancer. At the center of his work is the identification of specific bacteria and fungi residing within tumors, findings that are reshaping how certain malignancies are understood and approached therapeutically. By analyzing the tumor microbiome, his team has opened new strategies for targeting cancer and potentially strengthening the patient’s immune response. 

The discussion reflected a broader theme of the visit: the movement from discovery to application. Straussman described not only the scientific insight, but the process of translating that insight into structured ventures designed to carry the research beyond academia. For participants evaluating Israel’s health ecosystem, the session offered a concrete example of how basic science can evolve into companies with international clinical relevance. 

Jonathan Sheffi, vice president of strategy and product excellence for the Life Sciences & Healthcare division at Clarivate, said the visit has already prompted him to move toward a structured initiative. Speaking with The Media Line, he stated, “I will create a business plan to develop a translational research platform based on Israel’s patient-level data.” The intention, he explained, is not incremental collaboration but systemic leverage. “Through this platform, I hope to spur financial and human capital investment in Israel by large pharmaceutical companies,” he noted. By building on what he described as Israel’s strengths in “software, data science, and AI,” Sheffi added that he hopes to help “create a new generation of Israeli drug discovery companies.” 

“It was announced that I will be joining the board of directors of Compugen,” Michele Holcomb told The Media Line, referring to the Israeli biotechnology company. Holcomb, a board director at PureTech Health and a veteran biotech and pharmaceutical executive, noted that the dialogue and interviews related to the appointment preceded the visit. Still, the timing highlighted the depth of integration between Israeli life sciences and global industry leadership. The flow of expertise, she suggested, moves in both directions. 

Lee Shapiro’s relationship with Israeli health technology stretches back more than two decades. As co-founder of Chicago-based 7wire Ventures, he has watched the ecosystem evolve from early digital health experiments to mature global companies. “Israel had a very organized longitudinal record for every citizen in Israel, kind of cradle to grave health information that existed,” he said, recalling the early infrastructure that allowed companies to innovate around data long before it became common elsewhere. 

Today, he sees few comparisons. “There really is very little comparison,” he said. “Israeli companies and their technology base are far advanced from where European companies have been and what we see coming out of Asia.” At the same time, he believes awareness lags behind reality. “We need more stories told about the life-saving technologies,” Shapiro said. “I don’t think people realize that some of the great medications that they’re using every day have come from Israel.” 

Those medications, devices, and digital platforms are embedded in health systems across North America, Europe, and Asia. Their impact is measured in survival rates, early diagnoses, and more efficient care pathways. Shapiro framed that reach culturally. “The spirit of tikkun olam in terms of healing the world is something that is part of the ecosystem here and is something that’s used in a way that can not only create great markets but also do good for the rest of the world,” he said. 

The conversation at Startup Nation Central broadened the lens further. There, attention turned to infrastructure: mapping innovation, matching investors with startups, and supporting regulatory and market entry abroad. 

Innovation, in Rob Cronin’s view, carries another dimension. As founder and CEO of 120/80 GROUP, a New York-based communications firm specializing in health technology, he sees economic impact and diplomacy intersect. “What I see as the opportunity and the ultimate form of diplomacy and the mechanism by which we can fight antisemitism is an economic, innovation-based form of tikkun olam,” he told The Media Line. “It’s about improving people’s lives.” 

Michelle Garland, founder and CEO of Soul Search Partners, has spent more than two decades placing executive teams in venture-backed health technology companies. What struck her most was not only product or capital, but people. “The talent here is exceptional, and the ideas are brilliant,” she told The Media Line. Sustained collaboration, she suggested, depends as much on relationships as financing. “We have to build more bridges,” she asserted. 

By the end of the conversation, her reflection turned personal. “I have a bigger tribe than I knew of,” she said, visibly moved. The remark pointed to something that ran beneath the week’s formal meetings: a sense that professional ambition, identity, and global health purpose were not entirely separate. 

Participants repeatedly described an ecosystem that is compact yet outward-facing, technically rigorous yet commercially disciplined. Israeli medical innovation is built with international application in mind. Therapies enter multinational trials. Digital platforms integrate into foreign health systems. Devices travel through supply chains that extend well beyond national borders. 

For Moed, that orientation remains central. “We want Israel to be seen as a global health care innovation powerhouse,” he said. The measure is not visibility, but penetration into global health systems. 

Israel’s growing role in global health care reflects more than scientific output. It reflects structure. As Kraft told The Media Line, “It’s often about connecting dots and getting people out of their old silos, their cognitive silos, their political silos, their belief silos, and better work together.” In a compact ecosystem where research, capital, and clinical infrastructure converge at close range, that ability to connect may be what places Israel at the center of how new medicine is built. 

Felice Friedson contributed to this report. 

Captions: The delegation visits the Resilience & Health Innovation Hub in Sderot, Israel. (Courtesy Israel Tech Mission)