HAIFA, Israel – A few months ago, a nine-year old Syrian girl was rushed to Rambam Medical Center in this North Israel city after suffering a severe head wound. The child apparently fell from the roof of her home and suffered internal bleeding, with head injuries to her eye sockets. 

Her family knew that a road leading to a local Syrian hospital was blocked because of deadly battles in the area, so they headed for the Israeli border. Although the child was not among those wounded in combat, the Israeli Defense Forces allowed her into Israel to receive the urgent care she needed, accompanied by her grandmother. The Syrian child and grandmother had never met an Israeli and had no idea what to expect.

But then Rambam Medical Center is all about the unexpected. Here, Jewish and Arab doctors work side by side to treat patients of various ethnic populations, including Jews, Arabs, Druze, Circassians, and Christians, many of whom live in this region. Many of the doctors also are deeply committed to new medical research aimed at accelerating health care in areas ranging from diabetes and metabolic disease to cancer immunotherapy to stem cell therapy.

Given its location only 50 miles from the Golan Heights frontier, Rambam’s medical staff has been on the frontline of treating seriously injured Syrians caught up in their country’s raging civil war. The 9-year-old girl was one of these victims; however, after three days of intensive medical treatment, her condition improved so she could be released. 

Along with her grandmother, she quietly returned to the Syrian border to rejoin her extended family. She left clinging to a teddy bear that one of the nurses had bought her.

Dr. Sergei Abeshaus, an attending neurosurgeon at Rambam who treated the child explains, “We really don’t know how and why she fell from the building but in our line of work you don’t ask too many questions. You just treat the patient. She was lucky, because she had a fractured skull but she had a minimal amount of cerebral bleeding. The staff did its best to make her and the grandmother feel comfortable.”

Given that Rambam Medical Center employs a number of Israeli-Arab nurses and doctors, the girl and her grandmother were able to communicate with medical personnel. “No doubt having Arabic speaking staff members is an advantage in these cases,” says Abehaus. “But, because of the situation being as delicate as it is, we don’t want to expose these people or their real names because they have to return home. We try very hard to respect their privacy and wishes. 

“In this particular case, the grandmother was very happy and thanked us for saving her grandchild,” the doctor adds. “As for the girl, we sent her home with a teddy bear.”

Medicine on the cutting-edge

In addition to treating patients, Rambam’s doctors are involved in globally pioneering medical research, including Dr. Naim Shehadeh, who heads the Department of Pediatrics and the Pediatric Diabetes Clinic at Rambam’s Meyer Children’s Hospital. One of his projects is a new infant formula enriched with insulin called Nutrinia, which supplements pre-term and term infant formulas with insulin. This glucose-regulating hormone is present in mother’s milk but absent from infant formulas that originate from powdered cow’s milk and soy. 

Shehadeh and his team have performed studies with very encouraging results. He says Nutrinia is on the verge of starting its phased trials as part of the Federal Drug Administration’s approval process, which could take up to three years.

Another of Shehadeh’s undertakings, Diabetes Good View (DGV), is based on his experiences with both younger and older people who suffer from long-term diabetes. Essentially, he developed sunglasses that can reduce the growth of diabetic retina disease, the No. 1 leading cause of blindness in people between the ages of 25 and 60. 

“By creating an optic filter that blocks a certain spectrum of harmful daytime light, we can reduce the severity of damage to the eyes,” Shehadeh says. Since these special filtered sunglasses are classified as a “medical device” instead of a formula or drug, Shehadeh believes that after a clinical trial on humans (he’s already conducted successful tests on rats), DGV will be available fairly quickly. 

The affable doctor who also sits on Rambam’s patent committee relishes the challenge of developing new technologies. “For me, it’s a built-in thing — a gift,” he says. “You don’t just decide to become an inventor. You recognize a problem and then you go try and solve it.”

Dr. Rafael Beyar, the hospital’s revered director and heart specialist, is proud of the unique cultural and medical interaction at Rambam. “Here, Jews and Arabs work shoulder-to-shoulder to save lives and to make an impact on medicine and medical research,” he said. “Twenty-five percent of our employees are Arabs and they reach the top positions in medicine, nursing, pharmacology and research. 

“Co-existence and love is our model,” he adds. “This model should be a sign for the world as to how medicine can create bridges for peace.

Nevertheless, says Beyar, during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Rambam found itself under attack from the Hezbollah. Although no one was hurt, a decision was soon made that some kind of structure was needed to protect patients and staff against conventional and unconventional warfare.

In 2010, work began on what will be  the world’s largest fortified emergency underground hospital, which can convert from a three-story parking lot into a 2,000-bed acute care hospital within 72 hours. When it opens (a date has not yet been set), the Sammy Ofer Fortified Underground Emergency Hospital will be able to generate its own power, store enough oxygen, drinking water and medical supplies for up to three days and keep out chemical or biological weapons.

A cure for heart disease?

Even during times of relative quiet, Beyar and his staff face enormous medical and personal challenges every day at Rambam, which operates at 99 percent capacity year-round. As Northern Israel’s largest medical facility (and fifth largest overall in the country), it treated 87,358 adults, 20,845 children and 10, 487 mothers-to-be during this past Jewish calendar year (5773). 

Beyar’s staff also has a direct link to the world-renowned Technion School, located on the Rambam’s medical campus. In the vaunted Technion building, which is also home to Rambam’s medical school, Dr. Lior Gepstein has a team of young doctors and scientists working with two types of stem cells that one day might be able to cure heart disease. It’s a glimpse into the future of medicine that recently left a group of Hollywood actors, some of whom had guest-starred on TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” positively speechless. This was especially the case after they saw a beating human heart cell developed via stem cells in a Petri dish.

“My research group applies emerging stem cell technologies to cardiovascular studies,” says Gepstein. “Our current research focuses on developing novel cell therapy and tissue engineering strategies for treatment of cardiac disorders (heart failure and cardiac arrhythmias), as well as drug screening and discovery. These studies are expected to provide new insights into inherited cardiac disorders, to allow optimization of patient-specific therapies (personalized medicine), and to facilitate development of new therapies.”

Though Gepstein admits that it could be years before these medical applications go from the Petri dish to cardiovascular patients at Rambam, he believes the future is closer than we think. 

 “What is new and exciting about our research is that we have shown that it’s possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young – the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” he says.