Zelig Eshhar

Education

From the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his Doctor of Philosophy from the Weizmann Institute.

Career

He has been the Chairman of the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute, serving two terms during the 1990s and 2000s. He received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science He has served on multiple editorial boards, including Cancer Gene Therapy, Human Gene Therapy, Gene Therapy, Expert Opinion on Therapeutics, European Journal of Immunology and the Journal of Gene Medicine.

He is mainly known for his studies on T cells and his pioneering work on chimeric antigen receptors.

His work has been the basis of the development of a unique immune cell approach that involves genetic modifications of T lymphocytes to produce a specific cell – called a “T body” (or CAR T-Cell)– that can be used to fight cancer. These genetically-engineered T cells have been shown to effectively kill human tumor cells both in vitro, and in experimental model systems in animals.

In pre-clinical animal models systems, Professor Eshhar established the conditions for a protocol to treat local as well as metastatic disease.

Eshhar’s original approach is being practice in pilot, phase I, II trials of end-stage patients with B cell lymphomas and leukemias.

In August 2011, University of Pennsylvania researchers reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that they had effectively used Professor Eshhar"s approach in a pilot trial of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). In December 2012, the researchers reported that 9 of 12 leukemia patients in the ongoing clinical trial responded to the therapy.

"This study provided a proof of concept for the potency of our T body therapy – previously shown to work in mice, it has now proved beneficial in cancer patients," Professor

Eshhar said at that time. In March 2013, researchers at New York"s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center reported the results from a clinical trial in which they used a method similar to the one in the University of Pennsylvania study with adults with chemotherapy-resistant B cell ALL that had a 100 percent success rate.

Currently, additional clinical trials of T cell therapy are being carried out at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas and at the National Cancer Institute, Maryland. Finally, in 2016, a team at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center and the Perelman School of Medicine reported in an article in the journal Science Translational Medicine that 27 out of 29 patients with an advanced blood cancer saw their cancers go into remission or disappear when they received CAR T-Cells.

In 2013 he was awarded the CAR Pioneering award by the ATTACK European Consortium.

Achievements

• In 2014 he shared the Massry Prize with Steven Rosenberg and James P. Allison and the Pioneer Award with Carl H. June. He is the recipient of the 2015 Israel Prize in Life Sciences.

Views

Quotations: "This study provided a proof of concept for the potency of our T body therapy – previously shown to work in mice, it has now proved beneficial in cancer patients,".