Making cancer more survivable
How Sheba Medical Center in Israel innovates for the world
This week on Life Sciences Today
My guest on Life Sciences Today this week was Ayelet Geva, Director of Innovation and Biz Dev Unit, Jusidman Cancer Center at the Sheba Medical Center.
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Ayelet Geva isn’t trying to make cancer care more “efficient.”
At Shebe she works with the medical team making cancer more precise, more personal, and more survivable.
At Sheba Cancer Center, Ayelet serves as Director of Innovation and Business Development, working with clinicians, data scientists, startups, and industry partners to commercialize innovation.
Her path into healthcare came after a background spanning product, data, AI, and management, and she describes her role as connecting people, technology, and real-world impact.
In practice, that means helping identify clinical problems worth solving, matching them with internal or external innovation, and moving promising ideas toward implementation or commercialization.
Her framework for value creation is clear: earlier detection and more precise treatment.
She sees oncology moving from one-size-fits-all protocols toward patient-specific pathways shaped by genomics, genetics, medical history, and family history.
The goal is not abstract innovation.
It is helping turn cancer into a more manageable chronic disease through precision medicine.
Value capture works differently in a hospital setting.
Sheba Medical Center in Israel is a nonprofit, so it does not operate like a VC-backed startup.
Instead, ideas can be cultivated internally, paired with external partners, and then routed through Impact, Sheba’s commercial arm, which handles tech transfer and commercialization. Revenue or funding generated can then be recycled back into future innovation.
Ayelet’s moat is unusually strong: direct access to real clinical problems, deep institutional credibility, rich patient data, and a structure that combines internal innovation with external partnerships.
The three things she wants oncologists to do with AI: don’t fear it, use it to build and test cohorts, and use it for multi-dimensional analysis across large patient populations.
The biggest anti-pattern in the innovation business in hospitals
Her biggest warning? Do not abandon basic science. The anti-pattern, in her view, is getting seduced by data and algorithms while neglecting foundational cancer biology.
Watch the show here
About me
I’m a pharma-tech founder who learned hard lessons the hard way. Over 22 years, I built five companies: four exits, one glorious flop. Customers ranged from Israeli medical device startups to Verily, Amgen and Walmart. 70+ clinical trials. 14 FDA.
My latest is OpenCRO - risk analysis for AI-enabled medical device companies.
Instead of generic cybersecurity playbooks, I do a 2 hour workshop with the client where people write down threat scenarios on paper cards. Liberating for people used to filling out Excel checklists.
OpenCRO agents take the stories, build the threat model and write analysis showing how to reduce reputation, revenue and regulatory risk.
If you are running an AI-enabled device company - I’d love to hear your story.