A new national infrastructure for biotechnology is now open for business. The Israel National Biotech Innovation Center, known as INBI, has officially launched and named Anat Cohen-Dayag, PhD, as Chief Executive Officer of INBI Core — the operational engine at the heart of the initiative. The appointment puts one of the life sciences industry’s most recognized executives in charge of building what organizers describe as a first-of-its-kind national platform for translating biotech research into market-ready companies. For anyone tracking how deep-tech ecosystems get built from the ground up, this one is worth watching — and it arrives at a moment when deep-tech startups are commanding serious investor attention globally.
Cohen-Dayag brings exceptional credentials to the role. She served as President and CEO of Compugen, a computational genomics and drug discovery company, for over two decades — a tenure that included steering the firm through multiple clinical-stage partnerships with major pharmaceutical players. Her background straddles computational biology and business strategy, which is precisely the combination INBI says it needs to bridge academia, industry, and government into one coherent pipeline. According to the PR Newswire announcement, Cohen-Dayag expressed that INBI represents a generational opportunity to institutionalize what has largely been an informal strength in life sciences innovation.
What INBI Is Actually Built to Do
INBI is structured around the idea that the biggest bottleneck in biotech is not scientific talent or early-stage ideas — it is the translation layer between discovery and commercialization. The center is designed to provide startups with shared infrastructure, regulatory expertise, business development support, and connections to global pharma and medtech partners. INBI Core, the entity Cohen-Dayag will lead, is the operational subsidiary responsible for executing those programs on the ground.
The model draws on established innovation center frameworks but aims to go further by embedding companies within a national-scale network rather than a single campus. According to the announcement, INBI’s founders see the initiative as a systemic fix for a gap that has long caused promising biotech ventures to stall between the research phase and Series A funding or partnership deals. The center is backed by a coalition that includes academic institutions and government stakeholders, though specific funding figures were not disclosed in the release. Momentum in national biotech infrastructure mirrors broader trends in AI and manufacturing — as Future Wire has covered, manufacturing automation hubs are similarly racing to close the gap between innovation and industrial scale.
Why the Leadership Choice Signals Serious Intent
Choosing Cohen-Dayag is not a symbolic appointment. Running Compugen for more than twenty years while navigating partnerships with companies like AstraZeneca and Bayer means she has operated at exactly the interface INBI needs to manage — where academic science meets the demands of multinational pharmaceutical development. That experience is rare, and placing it at the head of a newly formed national center rather than a private venture suggests INBI’s backers are prioritizing execution credibility over brand-name momentum.
Cohen-Dayag has also spoken publicly in the past about the need for computational approaches to de-risk early drug discovery, which aligns with INBI’s stated focus on leveraging data and technology platforms alongside wet-lab research. If the center follows through on its mandate, it could meaningfully compress the timeline from discovery to clinical validation — one of the most expensive and failure-prone stretches in all of medicine. The formal launch and leadership announcement positions INBI not as a concept but as an institution ready to take on companies in active development. The next visible milestone will be which startups it onboards first and what infrastructure commitments it can demonstrate within its initial operating year.
