April 2020: Hagai wins Chan Zuckerberg grant

Dr. Tzachi Hagai, Edmond J. Safra affiliate (Life Sciences), won the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grant on "Single-cell analysis of inflammation".  The grant was awarded jointly to Hagai, Giacomo Donati (University of Torino) and Ken Natsuga (Hokkaido University Hospital).  

Hagai is the first researcher in TAU to receive this prestigious grant.

CZI’s Inflammation program supports researchers and interdisciplinary teams to study how inflammation influences disease in cells and tissues. Dr. Hagai and his colleagues won the grant for their research titled "Deciphering Inflammatory Memory in Wound Healing".

The skin’s ability to regenerate is essential for its function as a barrier against external assaults. Following injury, skin cells gain inflammatory memory that allows faster regeneration of future injuries. However, how this memory works is poorly understood. In this project, the team will explore how specific cell types change and respond to injuries, exploring the molecular mechanisms responsible for inflammatory wound healing. Detecting memory genes and their expression in specific cell linages may hold great biomedical promise as therapeutic targets in wound-healing-related skin diseases.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, is a new kind of philanthropy that is leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges.