The Israel Diamond Exchange (IDE) announced on 8 April that it plans to build a 120-storey tower within the Diamond Exchange complex in Ramat Gan Municipality. The tower will be the tallest in Israel and one of the ten tallest buildings in the world.

The building will expand the size of the Diamond Exchange complex to 800,000 sqm, from the 100,000 sqm it currently occupies. Bourse members will allocate some of the new area for use, and the rest will be leased to other business entities.

The project is being promoted by the Ramat Gan Municipality and will include two additional skyscrapers of 88 stories and 77 stories, expanding the number of towers on land owned by IDE to six.

According to Ramat Gan Mayor Carmel Shama-Hacohen, “The new compound will include the flagship tower of the State of Israel and will be the entrance gate to Ramat Gan.”

IDE President Yoram Dvash said: “We have a vision to expand and upgrade the complex to a bustling business centre and a bustling city centre for Ramat Gan, which is no less big and ambitious than the vision of the diamantaires in the 1960s. I was pleased to discover that the mayor is a partner to this vision.”

An anti-cancer therapy that has been developed by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Technology will receive a US$10 million investment from a South Korean biopharmaceutical company BioLeaders Corporation, which is traded on the Korea Stock Exchange. This is the firm’s first investment in an Israeli venture.

The Weizmann Institute also announced that a second sum of US$2 million will be invested by Yozma Group Asia, a VC fund, in On-Sight Medical Inc., jointly owned by Yeda Research, New York University (NYU) Medical School and other parties.

The institute said that the two Korean entities have committed to investing in two spinoff companies set up by Yeda Research and Development Co. Ltd., the technology transfer arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

BioLeaders Corporation, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical firm, has signed a Letter of Intent with Yeda for the incorporation of a jointly owned company that will be set up in the coming months to develop the anti-cancer drug.

The drug will be based on the research of Weizmann Institute professors Varda Rotter and Moshe Oren, both of the Molecular Cell Biology Department.

Rotter and Oren were among the first to discover the function of the p53 protein – called the “guardian of the genome”. This protein is mutated or dysfunctional in over two-thirds of all cancers; such malfunctions can cause the cancer to spread faster. The two researchers recently developed a peptide – a small piece of protein – that can restore proper p53 function. The peptide they developed targets the malformed p53, and enters the cell and binds to the protein.