The next revolution in precision oncology

Eytan Ruppin, MD, PhD

Co-Founder

Eytan is Chief of the Cancer Data Science Lab at the NCI.  Prior to that, he was Director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where he also served as a professor of computer science.

Eytan has co-founded a number of precision medicine and cancer drug discovery startups, including Metabomed, Medaware, and Pangea Biomed.  He is a member of the editorial boards of EMBO Reports and Molecular Systems Biology, and a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology.  His recent research focuses on developing new computational approaches for synthetic lethal and transcriptomics-based precision oncology and immunotherapy.

Eytan received his MD and PhD in computer science from Tel Aviv University, where he also served as a professor of computer science and medicine.

Ze’ev Ronai, PhD

Co-Founder

Ze’ev is the Director of the NCI Cancer Center at Sanford Burnham Prebys Discovery Institute in La Jolla, California.  Prior to his appointment as director, he served as deputy director and program director.  Ze’ev is an expert in cancer biology, with over 300 peer-reviewed publications, reviews and book chapters to his name, as well as a recipient of the Outstanding Investigator Award from the NCI and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Melanoma Research.  His research interests include studies on stress response, with a focus on ubiquitin ligases in hypoxia and ER stress as they pertain to cancer development, progression, and therapy resistance. His recent studies led to clinical trials and set new paradigms in understanding cancer biology.

Ze’ev holds a PhD in tumor immunology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. Following postdoctoral research at Columbia University, he was tenured at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Eyal Gottlieb, MD, PhD

Co-Founder

Eyal is the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Chair of Cancer Research for the Faculty of Medicine at Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.  He studies the metabolic adaptations that support tumor growth under metabolic stress.  Specifically, he explores vulnerabilities induced by the loss of the metabolic tumor suppressors fumarate hydratase (FH) and succinate dehydrogenase (SDH).

Eyal received his BSc in agriculture from Hebrew University, as well as an MSc and a PhD in molecular cell biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science.  In 1998, he became an EMBO fellow at the University of Chicago and later became a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Special Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.  In 2003, he moved to the Cancer Research-UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow and was then appointed as Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at the University of Glasgow in 2009.

Raanan Berger, MD, PhD

SAB Member

Raanan is a senior oncologist and radiotherapist, serving as Director of the Cancer Center at Sheba Medical Center, Israel.  In 2006, he established the Riva Koschitzky Oncology Clinical Research Unit at Sheba, the largest center for all-phase oncology clinical trials in Israel, currently conducting over 200 advanced clinical trials.  He is also a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Medical School, and runs a basic and translational research lab studying molecular mechanisms in prostate and breast tumorigenesis.

Raanan is a member of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) and American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), as well as co-author of over 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles. He received his MD and PhD from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School.

Ezra Cohen, MD, FRCPSC, FASCO

SAB Member

Ezra is an internationally renowned cancer researcher. He serves as co-director of UC San Diego Health’s Precision Immunotherapy Clinic, and as associate director for translational science and the leader of the Solid Tumor Therapeutics research program at Moores Cancer Center. He was previously co-director of the Head and Neck Cancer Program at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Ezra leads a laboratory that studies novel cancer treatments, including immunotherapy, and has made major contributions to targeted cancer therapies. A frequent speaker at national and international meetings, he has authored over 170 peer-reviewed papers and has been the principal investigator of multiple clinical trials of new drugs for head and neck cancer and other solid tumors.

Ezra earned his medical degree at University of Toronto. He is board certified in medical oncology, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (FRCPSC), and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (FASCO).

Dan A. Landau, MD, PhD

SAB Member

Dan is a core faculty member at the New York Genome Center.  He is also an Associate Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.  Previously, he was an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Dan’s goal is to devise therapies that directly anticipate and address tumor evolution.  He pioneered the study of intratumoral genetic and epigenetic diversity in patient samples to understand cancer evolution in its natural environment.

Dan has received multiple awards, including the 2019 Weill Cornell Department of Medicine Young Investigators Award, a 2018 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, an ASPIRE Award from The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, a Stand Up to Cancer Philip A. Sharp Innovation in Collaboration Award, and a Lung Cancer Discovery Award from the American Lung Association.  Dan obtained his MD from Tel Aviv University. He then went on to receive his PhD from Paris Diderot University.

J. Silvio Gutkind, PhD

SAB Member

Silvio is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Pharmacology at UCSD School of Medicine, as well as the Associate Director for Basic Science at Moores Cancer Center.  His research team studies the molecular basis of cancer, with an emphasis on basic mechanisms of signal transduction and cell growth control, and their dysregulation in cancer. He has published over 400 original studies in prestigious journals and organized and co-organized national and international meetings and symposia on signal transduction and oral cancer research.

Silvio received his PhD in pharmacy and biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).  He was then Chief of the Oral and Pharyngeal Cancer Branch at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) until his recruitment to Moores Cancer Center.

Gideon Rechavi, MD, PhD

SAB Member

Gideon is Professor of Hematology and the Djerassi Chair in Oncology at Tel Aviv University. He served as head of the Division of Hematology at Sackler School of Medicine and as head of the Tel Aviv University Cancer Biology Research Center. In 2003, he established the Sheba Cancer Research Center, which he still heads, and since 2016 he has been heading the Wohl Institute for Translational Medicine.

His research interests are RNA epigenetics, transposable genetic elements, and cancer genomics, with special emphasis on pediatric cancer. He has published over 500 articles in prestigious journals.  Gideon is an Israel Prize laureate in medical research and has also been awarded the EMET Prize for Genetics and an ERC Advanced Grant.  Additionally, he was selected for the Ernest and Bonnie Beutler Research Program of Excellence in Genomic Medicine.  Gideon received his MD from Tel Aviv University and PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is board certified in hematology, pediatrics, and pediatric hematology-oncology.

Keith T. Flaherty, MD

Scientific Advisor

Keith is Director of Clinical Research at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  He has authored or co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed primary research reports on seminal observations that have defined the the efficacy of BRAF, MEK and combined BRAF/MEK inhibition in treating melanoma.  He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Cancer Research.

Keith is a leader in identifying and clinically evaluating de novo and acquired resistance to BRAF inhibitor therapy, work that has implications for the treatment of other malignant diseases.  He obtained his MD from Johns Hopkins University in 1997, after which he completed his internship and residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.  Keith then completed a fellowship in medical oncology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.  Prior to Mass General, he was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and an Adjunct Professor at the Wistar Institute.