Harvard Medical School and Clalit Research Institute in Tel Aviv have announced a gift from the Berkowitz family to launch a joint precision-medicine initiative.

The gift — the amount of which remains undisclosed at the donors' request — will establish the Ivan and Francesca Berkowitz Family Living Laboratory Collaboration, through which the Ivan and Francesca Berkowitz Family Living Laboratory at HMS and the Ivan and Francesca Berkowitz Family Precision Medicine Clinic at Clalit will conduct joint research. Clalit also will set up Israel's first precision-medicine clinic dedicated to diagnosing and identifying tailored therapies for patients with rare, undiagnosed, and hard-to-treat conditions for whom no standard treatment has proven effective. The research component of the initiative will work to generate insights from data and translate them into frontline clinical interventions, while the educational component will train the next generation of biomedical informaticians and computational biologists.

A cohort of postdoctoral trainees from Israel will be selected as Berkowitz Postdoctoral Fellows to conduct part of their research at HMS and part of it at Clalit, forging stronger training and research ties between the two institutions; a group of clinical researchers from Israel will be selected as Berkowitz Scholars to attend a summer bootcamp in biomedical informatics at HMS; and faculty members from HMS serving as mentors in the postdoctoral program will work directly with Clalit researchers with the option of serving in residence at Clalit.

"The many synergies of this collaboration will allow us to realize the vision of precision medicine and move towards a future of predictive medicine, where the power to anticipate medical risk can prevent people from getting sick in the first place," said Ben Reis, affiliate faculty member in HMS's Department of Biomedical Informatics and director of the Predictive Medicine Group at the Boston Children's Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program. "The Berkowitzes' generous gift creates profound opportunities both for Harvard and our partners at Clalit. We look forward to realizing the enormous potential of this transformational opportunity for the benefit of patients worldwide."

"It is our hope that through this effort, we can harness the strength of both Harvard Medical School and Clalit in a way that will allow this collaboration to produce enormous benefits to both health and medical care globally," said Ivan Berkowitz. "We are very happy to be one leg of this three-legged stool — the technology and medicine, the healthcare system and, ultimately, the philanthropy, which makes it all happen."