ICRF and CRI Announce Co-Funding of Translational Immunotherapy Grant

The Cancer Research Institute (CRI) and Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF ) have partnered to award and co-fund, respectively, a Clinic and Laboratory Integration Program (CLIP) Grant to support the promising immunotherapy research of Yifat Merbl, PhD, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The CLIP grant, amounting to $200,000 over two years, was established by CRI to support investigators who are studying critical topics at the intersection of laboratory and clinical research. This collaboration builds on another partnership that supported immunotherapy research conducted in Israel—The Immunotherapy Promise—between CRI, the leading funder of immunotherapy research internationally, and ICRF, North America’s largest nonprofit dedicated to supporting cancer research in Israel and the largest non-governmental funder of Israeli cancer research.

Professor Merbl’s project, “Controlling Proteasomal Degradation for Enhancing Anti-Tumor Immunity” hopes to characterize the proteasome degradation landscape in melanoma, aiming to gain insight into the mechanisms of immune evasion and lack of response to immunotherapy. This approach should ultimately lead to a novel system to target proteasome degradation in order to improve cancer treatment.
 
While immunotherapy first emerged as a form of FDA-approved cancer treatment in the late 1980s, it is only within the past decade that this class of therapy has begun to deliver significant survival benefit to patients, bringing it to the forefront of public attention. New immunotherapeutic approaches have been shown in clinical trials to effectively treat patients with bladder, head and neck, kidney, and lung cancers as well as leukemia, lymphoma, and melanoma, with clinical trials under way for more than 25 other types of cancer.  

“The Cancer Research Institute and Israel Cancer Research Fund have teamed up again to bring philanthropic support of immunology research to scientists in Israel who are working to harness the immune system’s power to fight all types of cancer, and this latest joint initiative furthers our shared goal of finding effective answers to cancer to save more lives and cure as many patients as possible,” said Jill O’Donnell-Tormey, Ph.D., CEO and director of scientific affairs at the Cancer Research Institute. 

Commenting on the partnership, David Abramson, president of ICRF said, “We know how crucial immunotherapy is in the area of cancer research and our unique partnership with the Cancer Research Institute has the potential to yield breakthrough discoveries in the field. It is our hope that many more Israeli scientists will benefit from our collaboration with CRI.”