RESEARCH
Featured Scientists
- Howard Cedar, M.D., Ph.D.
- Dr. Cedar has
conducted innovative research in areas of gene regulation and
expression and DNA replication. Dr. Cedar is interested in how genes
are turned on and off during normal development and how this regulation
becomes compromised in cancer. He contends that to understand what
makes a cancer cell you first have to understand what a normal cell is
and what processes take place within it.
- Dr. Cedar has discovered that in
cancer, the normal regulatory mechanism of genes is faulty and cells
divide in excess, generating a tumor. He feels a next necessary step is
to develop drugs that will alter gene modification when that process
goes away. This will essentially remove the “cancer” from the cancer
cells.
- Dr. Cedar has achieved a leading
role on a worldwide scale in his field, and his articles have appeared
in many international journals. Fifteen years ago, The Scientific
Review Panel recognized Dr. Cedar’s talent and chose to support it. In
1999, Dr. Cedar was awarded the Israel Prize in Biology. The Israel
Prize is Israel’s highest civilian honor.
- Dr. Cedar graduated from M.I.T. in
1964 where he studied mathematics and physics. He then earned his M.D.
and Ph.D. degrees at New York University. He has been a research
associate at the National Institutes of Health in the United States and
a Schaeffer Visiting Professor of Physiology at the Columbia University
Medical School. He is currently a professor at the Hadassah Medical
School of Hebrew University as well as the Director of the Transgenic
Research Unit.
- Aaron Ciechanover, M.D., Ph.D.
-
Dr. Ciechanover has been awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry. He
is also the winner of the prestigious Albert and Mary Lasker Award
2000. The Albert and Mary Lasker Medical Research Awards annually focus
attention on an elite list of contributors who have made major advances
in the understanding and diagnosis of many challenging diseases. Out of
300 awards presented since 1945, 60 Lasker laureates have gone on to
receive the Nobel Prize.
- Dr. Ciechanover and two colleagues
were recognized for their groundbreaking discovery of the ubiquitin
system, a protein degradation that critically influences vital cellular
events, cell cycles and malignant transformations. The ubiquitin system
has been implicated in the pathogenesis of many human diseases
including Alzheimer’s.
- Dr. Ciechanover was born in
Hungary and emigrated to Israel in 1950. He earned a M.D. in 1964 and a
Ph.D. in 1969 from Hebrew University, Hadassah Medical School in
Jerusalem. In 1971, Dr. Ciechanover completed an International
Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Medical
Center, in San Francisco. He is currently the Director of the Rappaport
Family Institute for Research and Professor of Biochemistry at the
Technion Israel Institute.
- Dr. Hershko, M.D., Ph.D.
-
Dr. Hershko has been awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry. He was
born in 1937, in Karcag, Hungary. In 1950, Hershko and his family
emigrated from Hungary to Israel. Hershko is a Distinguished Professor
at the Unit of Biochemistry, the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the
Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa, Israel. He became a
Professor at the Technion in 1980, and was an Associate Professor there
from 1972 to 1980.
- Dr. Hershko and Dr. Ciechanover
won their Nobel Prize for discovering a process that lets cells destroy
unwanted proteins. Dr. Herhko started researching how proteins are
“degraded” in cells thirty years ago. He and his then student, Aaron
Ciechanover, discovered the ubiquitin /proteasome system.
- In 2003, the FDA announced the
approval of Velcade, a new treatment for multiple myeloma, a cancer of
the bone marrow, “the frist in a new class of anticancer agents.”
Velcade, Dr. Hershko noted, “is the first drug specifically targeted
against the uiquitin system. It is based on our research. Many other
new drugs will be discovered which are targeted against specific
processes that go wrong in the ubiquitin system in different types of
cancer. These include cancer of the colon, breast, prostate and
melanomas.
- Moshe Oren, Ph.D.
-
Dr. Oren, of the Weizmann Institute of Science has received
international recognition for discovering the location and revealing
the nature of the gene, p53. The p53 gene stops tumors before they
grow, but if damaged, is involved in the formation of 60 percent of
cancers. Todays over 2000 scientists around the world are working to
turn this basic research into a clinical benefit.
- Dr. Oren earned a Master of
Science degree at Tel Aviv University, and a Ph.D. in Virology at the
Weizmann Institute in Israel. He took a one-year sabbatical in 1988 at
Stanford Medical School. He served as a Fellow in Microbiology at SUNY
Stony Brook, and was a Fellow in Biochemical Sciences at Princeton
University. He is currently the Director of the Forchheimer Center for
Molecular Genetics at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.
- Yair Reisner, Ph.D.
-
Dr. Reisner, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, led an
Israeli-Italian team in the development of a novel bone marrow
transplant technique for Leukemia patients. He was one of four bone
marrow transplant specialists flown to the Soviet Union to treat
victims of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident.
- Dr. Reisner developed a technique
that expands the eligible donor pool for Leukemia patients seeking a
bone marrow transplant donor. Heretofore, patients eligible for a bone
marrow transplant needed a donor whose immune system matched theirs for
six genetic markers. In Dr. Reisner’s new technique, many immature bone
marrow cells are taken from the donor and cleansed. With this method, a
perfect match requires just three immune markers in common, thereby
dramatically increasing the possible donor pool and reducing the danger
of an immune attack and subsequent death. The technique is now being
carried out at Yale and a few other centers. It will be made more
widely available to patients in a few years.
- Dr. Reisner earned his M.Sc. from
the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from the
Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
- Alberto Gabizon, M.D., Ph.D.
-
Dr. Gabizon, of the Hadassah University Hospital, received
international recognition for the development of Doxil, an FDA-approved
drug used in the treatment of a form of cancer in AIDS, as well as
breast and ovarian cancer. This drug uses a totally new delivery system
that might also be used to reduce side effects found in other drugs.
The drug is packaged in a fatty bubble called a “liposome” which allows
the drug to be delivered directly to the tumor site without damaging
surrounding body parts. Liposomes are so small that they can float
through the bloodstream and slip through the body’s defenses unnoticed.
The tiny balloons bypass healthy organs and deposit themselves directly
inside tumors.
- Dr. Gabizon earned his M.D. from
the University of Granada in Spain, and his Ph.D. from the Weizmann
Institute of Science in Israel.
- Laura Benjamin, Ph.D.
-
Dr. Benjamin, of Hebrew University, found that tumor blood vessels are
“immature”, thinner than normal blood vessels, lacking outer layers of
muscle and connective tissue. These “immature” blood vessels require a
molecule called Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) to survive.
Reduction of VEGF leads to destruction of immature blood vessels,
starving surrounding cancerous tissue, causing cancer cell death. Dr.
Benjamin earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Andrew Levy, M.D., Ph.D.
-
Dr. Levy, of Technion Israel Institute of Technology, also dealt with
Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF). Levy and his colleagues
identified VEGF in 1989. Dr. Levy has developed a blood test that can
predict a person’s ability to grow these new blood vessels. The growth
of blood vessels is important in supplying oxygen to starved tissues,
such as in heart attack and stroke. Blocking the information of new
blood vessels is key to combating tumor growth, which needs the
formation of new blood vessels to continue to grow.
- Dr. Levy’s studies show that the
variability of humans to grow their own blood vessels can be measured
by growth factors found in the blood. In 1992 Dr. Levy showed that VEGF
was regulated by a loss of oxygen. The cell senses a drop in oxygen and
sends out VEGF and other growth factors that start making new vessels.
Dr. Levy received his M.D. and Ph.D. from John Hopkins University.
- Leah Eisenbach, Ph.D.
-
Dr. Eisenbach, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, has shown that you
can “teach” the immune system to reject metastases by vaccination with
certain protein fragments know as peptides from human cancer cells. She
is developing a system to test these peptides. Dr. Eisenbach earned her
Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute in Israel.