Israel launches a $500 million philanthropic hub to turn lab discoveries into drugs
Fifteen universities, hospitals and health funds joined the Israel National Biotech Innovation Center, which aims to rescue promising research stranded by a funding drought.
On 6 September 2026 a new non-profit, the Israel National Biotech Innovation Center (INBI), was formally launched with the backing of fifteen of the country's leading research and health institutions: the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Technion, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan, Ben-Gurion and Haifa universities, the Clalit and Maccabi health funds, and the Sheba, Beilinson, Ichilov, Shaare Zedek, Rambam and Hadassah hospitals. Its investment arm, INBI Core, aims to raise $500 million over ten years, mainly from philanthropists in Israel and abroad, and is also in talks with government ministries and the Israel Innovation Authority about matching support.
The centre is meant to fill a gap that has widened as investors pull back. Israeli universities and hospitals produce a stream of promising biomedical discoveries, but venture funds increasingly avoid the riskiest, earliest stage of turning them into medicines, and Israeli biotech and health-tech funding in 2025 fell to its lowest level in five years. INBI plans to pick up projects once the institutions' own technology-transfer offices have done their part, then either build new start-up companies around them or license them to pharmaceutical firms. It intends to back cohorts of about ten projects a year and to provide laboratories and experts in financing, scientific validation and drug development, with the first companies expected within about a year.
According to Globes, the initiative grew out of the 8400 Helix US-IL Task Force, a network of senior biotech figures from both countries. It is chaired by Samuel Moed, a former head of corporate strategy at Bristol Myers Squibb, who told The Times of Israel that great research was languishing in labs. The fund is led by Anat Cohen-Dayag, executive chair of the Israeli drug-discovery company Compugen, which she ran for fifteen years. She told Globes that the team would work proactively to find innovations that can become leading products.
“In a year's time we'll have companies, and money assured for a decade.”
Many potential treatments never leave the laboratory because no one funds the expensive early steps toward a drug. A patient, philanthropy-based fund spanning nearly all of Israel's research universities and major hospitals could turn more of that science into therapies for patients worldwide.
Sources
- As investors dry up, national biotech hub aims to transfuse early-stage drug fundingThe Times of Israel, September 8, 2026
- New initiative seeks $500m to commercialize Israeli life scienceGlobes, September 7, 2026
Summarised in our own words from the reporting above.
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