Zelig Eshhar
Zelig Eshhar was an Israeli immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. He was Chairman of the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute twice, in the 1990s and 2000s.
Background
Zelig Lipka was born in Petah Tikva on February 25, 1941, and grew up in Rehovot. After his IDF service in Nahal, he joined Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, where he became a beekeeper. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute.Eshhar died in Tel Yitzhak, Israel on July 3, 2025, at the age of 84.
Medical research
Eshhar 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 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.