Elie Hirschfeld Supporing Research on Antibodies and Immunology

The research currently being funded by Elie Hirschfeld at the Weizmann Institute of Science is expanding efforts to improve cancer immunotherapy and combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers developing these projects, Dr. Rony Dahan and Dr. Ziv Shulman, both recently completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Rockefeller University.

Dr. Rony Dahan is focusing his lab’s research on improving drugs that bind to checkpoint receptors and inhibit their activity. Concentrating on antibodies already approved for pharmaceutical use, this research is creating practical strategies for improved cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Dahan’s lab is also deeply involved with a recently signed, three-year agreement between the Weizmann Institute of Science and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, focused on the development of innovative antibody-based cancer immunotherapies for various types of cancer.

Dr. Ziv Shulman and his group study how immune cells adjust the activity of their antibody-encoding genes to optimize their response to any particular pathogen. The Shulman lab teamed with Prof. Eran Segal’s group in the Departments of Molecular Cell Biology, which has developed an assay to test cross-reactivity of serum antibodies with a variety of other coronaviruses. The researchers found that a few of the monoclonal antibodies recovered in the Shulman lab were pan-specific — they could bind nearly all types of coronaviruses found in both humans and animals. A paper based on these findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Science Immunology.