Zelig Eshhar

Zelig Eshhar is an Israeli immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. 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 B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute. 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 cancer immunotherapy, involving genetic modifications of T lymphocytes extracted from a cancer patient to produce chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-Cells, which are then injected back into the patient in a process called adoptive cell transfer, that produced startlingly good results in clinical trials in the mid-2010s and millions of dollars of investment.

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