Research and development

Reversed personalized medicine & Integrated Immuno-Oncology

The immune system is the most sophisticated real time personalized medicine machine. Today, we can harness its power to treat cancers such as melanoma with immuno-oncology drugs, but in 50-70% of the cases treatment still fails.

We hypothesize that manipulation of the whole patient could render patients that did not respond to immunotherapy into responders. Reversing the personalized medicine concept, we aim to fit patients to the existing drugs by modifying the whole patient. Such an approach enables a fast track into clinical testing, which can potentially change clinical practice in the short term. Modification of the whole patient could be done by altering the microbiome, metabolism etc.

In order to understand which features to focus on, we run high throughput analyses on hundreds of tumor specimens from patients treated with immunotherapy. By applying bioinformatics, different processes that define responders and non-responders are identified. These processes are studied mechanistically in cell and animal models, which provides with grounds for subsequent clinical interventions. Our group integrates basic immunology models (in vitro and in vivo) and bioinformatics, with patient-derived specimens and data, all the way to full investigator-initiated in house clinical trials.

Lab members

Principal Investigator:    Prof Gal Markel

Head of Laboratory:        Dr Rona Ortenberg

Scientist:                              Dr Dekel Bar-Lev

PhD Students:                   Bela Vizel, Rutie Polliser, Ettai Markovits, Erez Baruch, Gony Shanel
Naama Margolis

Logistics                               Vered Levi