@Sheba
Our Research Center
The Bert W. Strassburger Metabolic Center at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel, is a premier institution specializing in the diagnosis, treatment, and research of lipid metabolism disorders and cardiovascular diseases. Established in 1993, the center has gained national recognition and is designated as Israel's National Center for Cardiovascular Metabolism.
Within the center, several research groups investigate different aspects of cardiovascular disease (CVD). We actively collaborate with many of these groups, including those led by Dr. Rom Keshet, Prof. Aviv Shaish, and Dr. Hofit Cohen, as well as with the Longevity Center and the Health Screening Institute.
Our group focuses on advancing the understanding of cardiovascular disease by studying hundreds of uncharacterized metabolites identified in human cohorts. We believe that these compounds—products of previously unknown human biochemistry - will reveal novel disease pathways and mechanisms critical to CVD onset and progression.
The Team
Dr Michael Elgart
Principal Investigator
Dr. Michael Elgart is a principal investigator and head of the Molecular Discovery Lab at Sheba Medical Center. He earned his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. His interdisciplinary research combines genetics, metabolomics, and machine learning to investigate how biochemical processes contribute to adaptation, physiological stress tolerance, and phenotypic buffering in complex conditions such as CVD
Dr Isadora Cohen
Research Scientist
Isadora holds a PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science and postdoctoral training at Université Paris Cité. Isadora has vast experience in biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology from academic labs, as well as the biotech industry, and is leading the effort to uncover novel biochemical pathways.
Dmitry Nemirovsky
Researcher
Dima holds a degree in chemistry from the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. As an officer in the IDF chemistry lab, he conducted experiments and trained teams in the areas of chemical synthesis and detection in complex samples. He has extensive experience in synthetic and analytical chemistry, which he applies in leading the lab’s chemical structure discovery efforts.
Shaked Rozenblatt
MSc Student
Shaked is studying the evolutionary conservation of cardiovascular biochemistry by looking at the functional involmenet of novel human metabolites in mouse CVD models
Haya Habib
MD Student
Haya is an MD student at the TAU Gray School of medicine and an incumbent of the Hetz excellence for Research program. She is studying novel biochemistry in familial atherosclerosis models
Dr Tzipi Shmueli
Researcher
Tzipi oversees the design and execution of experimental pipelines that support our AI-driven drug discovery efforts in cardiovascular disease. Her work involves generating high-quality molecular and phenotypic data from cell culture models to train and evaluate predictive models of drug response.
Dr. Alexander Tarnopolsky
Student
Alex is a PhD from Bar-Ilan who is building advanced ML models to better predict MS/MS fragmentation patterns for in-silico identification of unknown metabolites
Gregory Kleiner
Student
Greg holds a MSc from the Bar-Ilan and is focused on designing machine learning frameworks that enhance the accuracy of MS/MS fragmentation prediction. His work aims to support the in-silico structural annotation of unknown metabolites, improving the interpretability and coverage of untargeted metabolomics data.