Conference President words about ICRS 2025
Dear all,
Thank you for joining the ICRS2025 meeting!
Many thanks also to the organizing committee for their help and support in making the conference such an enjoyable event. I’m happy to share with you a summary of the meeting highlights:
We were happy to host about 200 participants, including 4 international Plenary and Invited Speakers, 28 local invited speakers, 114 students, 44 investigators/research team members, as well as representatives from two patent attorney offices and an information services company. We were able to gather researchers from many different fields to share ideas on drug delivery and controlled release, from basic research to clinical applications.
I would like to thank our Invited Speakers Samir Mitragotri, Alexander (Sasha) Kabanov, and Alexander Tropsha for traveling to Israel to share their outstanding research despite challenging circumstances, and to Molly Shoichet for joining us remotely and delivering an inspiring lecture. I am grateful to all speakers and panelists for their invaluable contributions to such a stimulating program. Your contributions are what truly made this meeting a success!
We were fortunate to have generous sponsors whose contributions enabled us to subsidize student registrations and present 14 student awards! Three Best Poster Presentation Awards were given: First Place to Anne Krinsky; Second Place to Elissar Ibraheem; and Third Place to Orr Bar Natan. In addition, four Special Prizes for outstanding abstracts (selected from 86 high-quality posters) were sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry and awarded to Anat Lyubin Haimov, Ajay Gupta, Giuseppe Longobardi, and Katerina Tischenko. The Peer Prize was awarded to Lior Stotsky (First Place), Marie Ruetter (Second Place), and Haim Kadosh (Third Place). The Barenholz Prize went to Ron Kleiner (First Place), Si Naftaly Kiros (Second Place), and Sivan Arber‑Raviv (Third Place). A special award in memory of Rimona Margalit was presented to Anshika Katyal. Many thanks to all our sponsors and congratulations to all the award recipients!!
During the meeting, Ronit Satchi-Fainaro was honored with the ICRS Award for Outstanding Achievements in Drug Delivery, recognizing her continued contribution to the ICRS and her pioneering research on the mechanisms underlying cancer dormancy and developing selective nanomedicines to target tumor–host interactions, advancing precision cancer therapy.
The social program included a party and cocktail evening, with music by DJ Capsula (Yosi Shamay), who prepared special tracks in a “drug delivery” theme - “Release the Control (Control the Release)”—as well as two tribute tracks dedicated to our plenary speakers: “Backpack” for Samir Mitragotri and “Synergy” for Alexander Kabanov. (The tracks are now available on YouTube).
Finally, I want to thank the amazing team at Kaleidoscope for their hard work and dedication throughout the meeting organization.
Wishing all the best to Ofra Benny, the newly elected President of the ICRS!
I wish you all a wonderful, successful, and productive year! We will continue to pray for the safety and swift return of the hostages, for the safe return of all our soldiers.
Shana Tova!
Ayelet
