October 2025: TAU team of students won a gold medal in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition

A TAU team, led by Prof. Tamir Tuller, won a gold medal at the prestigious iGEM competition recently held in Paris, France. The medal was awarded to the Israeli team for a groundbreaking strategy aimed at developing a lung cancer treatment for cancer patients who were previously incurable. The study reached the finals of the Outstanding Oncology Research and the Outstanding Model.

iGEM is a worldwide synthetic biology competition, in which hundreds of groups from universities around the world participate every year and present novel ideas that address current global issues. This year, the iGEM annual contest took place on October 28-31, 2025, in Paris, and a team from TAU participated for the 7th time.  The TAU team, led by Prof. Tamir Tuller, Edmond J. Safra Center member (Engineering), included eleven students from the Faculties of Engineering, Life Sciences, Medicine, and Exact Sciences: Shir Shance (co-captain), Idan Eyni Galanti (co-captain), Michael Kovaliov, Ester Buderovsky, Ariella Nouman, Roni Zarakhovsky, Gal Aziel, Niv David, May Lieber, Din Saadon, and Hillel Charbit. Dr. Daniel Dovrat was the team instructor.

The steering committee of the project included Prof. Avigdor Eldar, Edmond J. Safra affiliate, Prof. Uri Gophna and Prof. Martin Kupiec, Edmond J. Safra members, and Itai Benhar, all from the Life Sciences Faculty. The steering committee also included Mr. Yair Sakov, the managing director of the TAU innovation and entrepreneurship Center. The TAU team was partially supported by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics.

This year, the team developed a strategy that enabled them to deal with several major challenges that must be addressed to find a solution for metastatic lung cancer. Tackling these challenges to defeat cancer was described by the team as a chess game against cancer. The solution includes a DNA sequence that silences a cancer gene, which is conjugated to an antibody that undergoes endocytosis into cancer cells. The different parts of the solution were designed by combining a variety of computational strategies and innovative algorithms.

The team has also submitted a patent application related to their novel technology and is working on putting together scientific papers about their novel discoveries. The team members also wrote a comprehensive and detailed business plan with the aim of bringing the product to the market. In addition to the scientific project, in collaboration with the ORT high school network in Israel, the team organized a national competition in the field of synthetic biology for high school students, in which hundreds of students participated.

The TAU iGEM team's gold medal win was featured in YNET.