Featured on Ynet, Dr. Oren Pleniceanu Receives The Prestigious Ziegler Award

As previously mentioned, Dr. Oren Pleniceanu has been awared the prestigious Ziegler Award for young scientists by the Israeli National Academy for Science in Medicine on the work titled:

"Successful Introduction of Human Renovascular Units into the Mammalian Kidney" which was published in JASN.

His award has been covered in the popular Israeli news outlet, YNET, link to the full article (scroll down).

"One of the main hurdles of using stem cells to treat diseases in patients is that even if we manage to produce clinically relevant cells, usually if we transplant them into the body, they will not have good vascularization, which will limit their ability to survive in the body and produce a beneficial effect. Therefore, in our research we decided to utilize cells that develop into human blood vessels and combine them with kidney stem cells, and inject them as a mixture into the kidneys of mice, to test if we will be able to get kidney transplants with a good blood supply. To our amazement, not only did the cells organize neatly into a developed network of blood vessels that fed the resulting kidney tissue, but the blood vessels formed from the injected cells connected to the mouse's existing blood vessels.  In addition, the same phenomenon happened when we injected this combination of cells into damaged kidneys, which indicates that the method also has clinical potential in disease states. In this sense - we have found an innovative solution to a very significant problem in the field of stem cell therapy" says Dr. Oren Pleniceanu.

"We are very proud of Dr. Pleniceanu. The Sagol Center for Regenerative Medicine, led by Prof. Benjamin Dekel, was established precisely for this purpose - providing integrated solutions to medical problems and the possibility of clinical application of the research. The center has built a community of experts, researchers and doctors from various disciplines such as tissue engineering, molecular and cellular biology, computational biology, immunotherapy, and more in order to provide a holistic solution to the field. The center's flagship program is a group of physician-researchers (MD-PhD) such as Dr. Pleniceanu, who has clinical experience and an innovative and integrative research vision that advances science towards patient treatment," said Dr. Keren Shternhall Ron, Chief Operating Officer of the Sagol Center for Regenerative Medicine. "Furthermore, these days we are holding a new call for grants, in order to locate groundbreaking research ideas such as Dr. Pleniceanu with the goal of continuing to advance the field of regenerative medicine in Israel forward."

Dr. Oren Pleniceanu who currently serves as the head of the kidney research laboratory at the Institute of Nephrology and Hypertension of the Sheba Tel Hashomer Medical Center and a member of the Sheba Physician-Researcher Program, deals with the biology of the mechanisms of kidney regeneration and the use of kidney stem cells to regenerate damaged kidneys.

The research was carried out at the Pediatric Stem Cell Research Institute at the Sheba Medical Center, under the supervision and direction of Prof. Benjamin Dekel and in collaboration with Prof. Shoshana Greenberg, Dr. Orit Harari-Steinberg and Dr. Dorit Omer.