About the Investigator:

Dr. Reiter develops new approaches for cancer immunotherapy. He performed his undergraduate studies at Tel Aviv University and received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, before he was recruited to the Technion where he is currently a Professor of Immunology and heads the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology in the Faculty of Biology.

About the Research:

An antigen is any substance that causes your immune system to produce antibodies against it. This means your immune system does not recognize the substance and is trying to fight it off. An antigen may be a substance from the environment, such as chemicals, bacteria, viruses, or pollen. Antigens may also be found on the surface of cancer cells.

Survival rates for pediatric and adult patients with recurrent or treatment-resistant B cell leukemias and lymphomas remain unsatisfactory, despite aggressive chemotherapy regimens and stem cell transplants from donors. The use of a patient’s own engineered T cells carrying a chimeric antigen receptor (or CAR) directed against surface molecules found on cancer cells has resulted in remarkable remission rates in patients with treatment-resistant hematological malignancies, but then resistance to CAR T cell therapy and subsequent disease relapse frequently occurs. This is often due to antigen loss or changes to the antigens being targeted.

Dr. Reiter and his team are working to develop a novel therapeutic strategy that can overcome the loss of target antigens and resistance to CAR-T cell therapy. Since CAR-T cell therapy has not been as effective in solid tumors as it has been in blood cancers, the Reiter lab hopes that the development of a second generation of CAR-T cell agents to fight disease relapse may also be applicable to the treatment of solid tumors as well.