Former president of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy.

Academic Appointments
Professor, Pediatrics - Human Gene Therapy
Professor, Genetics
Member, Bio-X
Member, Cardiovascular Institute
Member, Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI)
Member, Stanford Cancer Institute
Member, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Administrative Appointments
Co-Organizer, American Society of Microbiology Meeting on Viral Vectors (2002 - Present)
Executive Committee, Faculty Senate - Stanford (2002 - Present)
Chief Scientific Advisor, Benitec, LLC (2003 - 2005)
Vice President, ASGT (2003 - 2004)
Chair of Organizing Committee, Gordon Conference on Viral Vectors for Gene Therapy (2003 - 2004)
President Elect, American Society of Gene Therapy (2004 - 2005)
President, American Society of Gene Therapy (2005 - 2006)
Associate Chair for Basic Research, Department of Pediatrics (2012 - Present)
Honors & Awards
Board of Directors, Oligotherapeutics Society (2011-current)
2017 Distinguished Alumni and Commencement Speaker- Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University (2017)
2017 Distinguished Alumni Award, Case Western Reserve University (2017)
Young Investigator Award, Western Society for Clinical Investigation (1996)
Arosenius Swedish Honorary Lectureship, - (1997)
All Honors & Awards (11)
Professional Education
B.S., Michigan State University, Physical Sciences (1980)
Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, Developmental Genetics (1986)
M.D., Case Western Reserve University (1987)

Professor Eyal Banin is Director of the Center for Retinal and Macular Degenerations (CRMD) at the Department of Ophthalmology at Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel.  He is a graduate of the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Medicine, holds a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the Hebrew University, and completed his ophthalmology residency at Hadassah Medical Center. Following a post-doctoral and medical retina fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Scheie Eye Institute in Philadelphia, he was appointed head of the Medical Retina Service and the CRMD at Hadassah. His main clinical and research focus is in the field of retinal and macular degenerations, including the development and application of novel cell- and gene-based therapies for these diseases. The recipient of many research grants from Israeli and foreign institutions, Dr. Banin has authored and published over 140 papers and articles in leading medical journals.

Prof. Batsheva Kerem received her B.S.c in Biology with distinction from the Hebrew University (1979) and her Ph.D. (1986). Her postdoctoral training was undertaken at the
Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada. In 1990, she returned to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a senior lecturer and as an associate professor (1998). From 2003, she was appointed full professor.

At the Hebrew University, Prof. Kerem established and chaired the National Genomic Knowledge Center at the Institute of Life Sciences (1997-2014), she served as the Head of Department of Genetics (2004-2006) and as the Head of the Authority for research students (from 2007-2011). In the last 7 years, Prof. Kerem is the university’s president advisor for promotion of women in science. 

Prof. Kerem received numerous prizes, including the Joels Senior Lectureship for Excellence in Science (1996), The Teva Prize for Excellence in Human Genome (1993), the Julodan Prize for Contribution to Medicine (1993).  Prof. Kerem was granted the Abisch-Frenkel Prize for Excellence in Life Sciences in 2003 and lastly, she was granted the Emet Prize in 2008.

Prof. Kerem is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). She serves on the editorial board of the European Journal of Human Genetics and EMBO Reports Journal and is a member of the European Research Council (ERC) for advanced scientists.

Prof. Kerem has published over 135 papers.

Professor Shulamit Levenberg is the head of the Stem cell and Tissue engineering lab at the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering and the director of the Technion Center for 3D Bioprinting. Prof Levenberg leads cutting-edge research in tissue-engineering by bioprinting complex tissue for regenerative medicine.  She was the first to engineer vascularized tissue flaps, offering novel reconstruction techniques using engineered tissue constructs. Her work also demonstrated the effect of scaffold stiffness and tensile forces on early differentiation and organization of stem cells in 3D constructs, and on alignment of vessel networks in engineered tissues. She recently developed unique stem-cell engineered tissue constructs that induce the regeneration and repair of injured spinal cords and a genetically engineered muscle tissue for treatment of type 2 diabetes.

Prof. Levenberg is founder and CSO of three start-up companies in the areas of cultured meat, spinal cord regeneration and nanoliter diagnostic arrays. 

Dan Peer is a Professor and the Director of the Laboratory of Precision NanoMedicine at Tel Aviv University (TAU). He is also the Vice President for Research and Development at Tel Aviv University. From 2016 - 2020, he was the Chair of Tel Aviv University Cancer Biology Research Center that includes 17 affiliated hospitals and from 2017 - Present, he is the Founding and Managing Director of the SPARK program of Translational Medicine at TAU. Prof. Peer is also the Chairman of Ramot, TAU Tech Transfer Company and Chairman of TAU Ventures, the Venture arm of TAUץ

Prof. Peer’s work was among the first to demonstrate systemic delivery of RNA molecules using targeted nanocarriers to the immune system and he pioneered the use of RNA interference (RNAi) in immune cells. In addition, his lab was the first to show systemic, cell specific delivery of modified mRNA to cells to induce therapeutic gene expression of desired proteins within the immune system that has enormous implications in cancer, inflammation and infection diseases (e.g. COVID 19 mRNA vaccines). In addition, his lab was the first to show high efficiency, systemic, cell specific therapeutic genome editing in cancer.

Prof. Peer has more than 130 pending and granted patents. Some of them have been licensed to several pharmaceutical companies and one is currently under registration (as a new biological drug in Inflammatory Bowel Disease). In addition, based on his work, five spin-off companies were generated aiming to bring innovative personalized medicine into clinical practice. 

Prof. Peer received more than 30 awards and honors and he serves on the scientific advisory board of more than 15 companies, and on the editorial board of more than 20 journals. He is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Controlled Release. Prof. Peer is a past President of the Israeli Chapter of the Controlled Release Society, and a Past Member of the Board of the Israel Young Academy.

Affiliation:

Dotan center for Advanced Therapies, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center

Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pathology, Tel Aviv University

Faculty of Life Sciences, School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry and Biophysics, Tel Aviv University

Eric Shifrut is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University and a principal investigator at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. Eric completed his graduate studies under the mentorship of Prof. Nir Friedman at the Weizmann Institute of Science, mapping the TCR repertoire in health and disease. For his postdoctoral training, he joined Alex Marson at UCSF and Gladstone Institutes to pioneer CRISPR discovery platforms to study primary human T cells. Today, Eric leads an independent team with the mission to leverage these achievements in CRISPR engineering to design best-in-class T cell therapies against cancer.

Prof. Ronit Satchi-Fainaro (Ph.D.) is a Full Professor at Tel Aviv University, Head of the Cancer Research & Nanomedicine Laboratory at the Department of Physiology & Pharmacology at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, The Lion Chair in Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies and the Director of the Cancer Biology Research Center. She received her B.Pharm. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, her Ph.D. from the University of London and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston. She joined Tel Aviv University in 2006. The overarching goal of Prof. Satchi-Fainaro’s multidisciplinary research is to establish preclinical models of cancer in order to rationally design novel clinically-translatable nanomedicines targeting tumor cells and their stroma. Prof. Satchi-Fainaro serves on several Boards of Directors of pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, VCs and Editorial Boards, and is a founder of a start-up biotech company. She published more than 150 manuscripts and is named inventor on 60 patents.