Assaf Zinger

✨ Exciting start to 2026 for The Zinger Lab! Proud to share 4 new papers advancing biomimetic nanomedicine: 🔬 Endothelial-targeted defined biomimetic NPs (SMALL) Read here: lnkd.in/d33xZFDV ⚙️ How fabrication shapes NP performance (Small Methods) Read here: lnkd.in/d-PVSswe 🤰 Nanomedicine for pregnancy challenges (@natrevbioeng ) Read here: lnkd.in/d-PVSswe 🧬 Drug-free immunotherapy for TNBC (@acsnano ) Read here: lnkd.in/dv-gBKCC Led by @OfriVizenblit , @ArberSivan , Ilana Elizarov, Rawan Mhajne & Tamar Gross Lev- powered by an amazing team. 🔗 TheZingerLab.com #Nanomedicine #Biomimetics #Immunotherapy #DrugDelivery @TechnionLive @TechnionUSA @technionalumni @CRSScience @ERC_Research

Check out our latest Cover!👇👇 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac… @acsnano @ACSPublications @TechnionLive @TechnionUSA @ICRF_Israel @ERC_Research #myacscover @CRSScience

@WillemNANO @ScienceAdvances @jozeephus Congratulations @WillemNANO and team! Super cool!🤗

In 2016, Mihai Netea and I brainstormed about using nanomedicine to induce trained immunity in bone marrow for cancer therapy. I designed a prototype, and PhD student Bram Priem led two experimental studies. Read the latest in @ScienceAdvances: science.org/doi/epdf/10.11…

@RSFLab @KathrinLaue @sabinapozzi @ERC_Research @FundlaCaixa @ICRFONLINE Brilliant! Congratulations @RSFLab and team!

Thrilled to share our latest study in Nature Genetics! We’ve identified a mechanism explaining how breast cancer spreads to the brain — one of oncology’s greatest mysteries. Proud of our amazing team, mainly @KathrinLaue & @SabinaPozzi. @ERC_Research @FundlaCaixa @ICRFONLINE @ISF

In our Bioinspired Nano-Engineering course, science becomes real when patients and families join the classroom. We were honored to host Mary-Lin Manor Sela, who shared her experience with triple-negative breast cancer. Her story transformed theory into purpose-reminding students that behind every experiment is a person waiting for better options. Every patient deserves a physician-scientist who believes a cure is possible. @OfriVizenblit @TechnionLive @ICRFONLINE @ERC_Research @lindaunobel @CRSScience

Hosting patients and families in our Bioinspired Nano-Engineering course connects research to real clinical needs. Science becomes personal- and purposeful. Every patient needs a physician/scientist who believes a cure is possible. #rett @Rettsyndrome @RSRT @TechnionLive @ERC_Research @CRSScience

Honored to receive the Montalcini Award (Council for Higher Education) as part of the Israel–Italy researcher exchange with @mastrotto80 ! 🇮🇱🤝🇮🇹 A meaningful step toward deeper international scientific collaboration. 🇮🇹 “Il meglio deve ancora venire!” More about Rita Levi-Montalcini’s legacy: nobelprize.org/stories/women-… @TechnionLive @UniPadova @ItalyinIsrael @ERC_Research

Pregnancy creates unique therapeutic challenges- but also opportunities for innovation. Excited to share our work on how nanomedicine can be engineered to protect two patients at once. 👇🏻 nature.com/articles/s4422… @natrevbioeng @ChristineHorejs @TechnionLive @ERC_Research

#nanomedicine should and can alter drugs pharmacokinetics during pregnancy! Brilliant talk by @tamar Gross Lev our Research Associate. #womenhealth @OfriVizenblit @TechnionLive @CRSScience

Got a raincoat from @RSFLab at 2019 after chairing the GRS. Finally used it today - turns out it’s amazing.🥰 Thanks Ronit!!!! Took me 6 years to realize Ronit’s weather foresight 🌧️🧥 @CRSScience @GlobalYAcademy

When your team really wants an ultra centrifuge and uses all the whatsapp messages and AI tools they have to try and convince you! @OfriVizenblit

Super enjoyed the APGI 2025 meeting at Turin! Great science and amazing people! Looking forward meeting you all in future conferences☺️ @CRSScience @TechnionLive @unito @ERC_Research

@pranamanam Love it! Congratulations buddy

What if you could take any membrane protein and edit its residues to make it soluble or improve its properties? With our newest version of MemDLM (now experimentally validated), you can do just that! 🌟 Check it out! 👇 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2410.16735 💻: huggingface.co/ChatterjeeLab/… Last year, my innovative undergrad @__shreygoel decided to try out masked discrete diffusion models (MDLMs) on membrane proteins. The model could generate transmembrane (TM)-like sequences and scaffold motifs better than autoregressive baselines 👍, but we didn't have a way to enforce residue-level constraints during sampling. 😔 So we pivoted to Reparameterized Diffusion Models (RDMs), which replace the categorical corruption process with a convex mixture of clean tokens and noise, giving us a forward process with closed-form transitions -- works incredibly well for unconditional membrane generation! 🌟 Then came our key new innovation: Per-Token Guidance (PET). Instead of steering generation with noisy global gradients (like classifier-free or LaMBO), PET uses a classifier (i.e. solubility) to build a residue-level saliency map, ranks tokens by importance (TM-like vs. soluble), and restricts edits to the low-saliency subset. 🛞This lets us solubilize membrane proteins while preserving functional helices, with edits that are controllable, interpretable, and biologically consistent!💡 The best part, we validated MemDLM in the lab! 🧪 Perin, an uber talented grad student in @htkratochvil's lab @uncchemistry, ran TOXCAT β-lactamase assays to confirm that MemDLM-generated designs successfully insert into membranes, almost perfectly correlating to MemDLM's confidence metrics ("GoodTM" sequences enabled strong growth curves, while "PoorTM" sequences showed slower or minimal growth)!! 🤌 Just incredibly proud of @__shreygoel (only a junior undergrad!) for both the algorithmic innovations and also his natural leadership in bringing this work together! And of course, we're super grateful to @htkratochvil and Perin (experts in membrane protein biology) for the incredible collaboration -- it's been a lot of crazy and fun back-and-forth from the dry to wet labs! 🤝 We're excited to keep pushing MemDLM forward with new experiments so stay tuned! 🫡 Finally, the model is open-sourced so try it out on our @huggingface! 🤗

@TheDayLab Congratulations Emily and team!👏🏻

Delighted to share the latest @TheDayLab publication: "Cancer Cell Membrane-Wrapped Nanoparticles for Photothermal Therapy and Photoacoustic Imaging of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer" in ACS Applied Nano Materials. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.10…