Ronit Satchi-Fainaro

Ronit Satchi-Fainaro
Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Principal Investigator

Sensitizing pancreatic cancer to immunotherapy with multimodal precision nanomedicines (NanoPanTher).

• María Jesús Vicent Docón (PL)
  Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe, Valencia

• Helena Isabel Fialho Florindo Roque Ferreira
  Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon

Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest diseases worldwide and suffers from poor early diagnosis and median survival rates of below 10 % for diagnosed patients. As current therapeutic approaches do not extend survival beyond a few months, the goal of NanoPanTher is to create a new therapeutic option that selectively kills pancreatic cancer cells without harming healthy organs/cells via combination therapy. This novel approach will include a precision nanomedicine, to inhibit cancer progression and deliver chemotherapeutic drugs only to pancreatic cancer cells, and a cancer nano-vaccine to harness the patient’s immune system to prevent tumor recurrence. Through this innovative approach, we expect to increase disease-free survival rates in patients and overcome severe and life-threatening side effects associated with many cancer therapies.

Ronit Satchi-Fainaro is a Full Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University (TAU). She joined TAU in 2006, where she gathered a multidisciplinary group. They identified molecular signatures that predict tumor dormancy associated with incompetency to recruit the supporting stromal microenvironment and the factors determining long-term survivorship of cancer patients. She is a founder of 3 spin-off companies and is actively engaged in translational research with several industry partners and in science outreach. She was awarded 4 European Research Council (ERC) research grants, and numerous prestigious grants and prizes. She received her B.Pharm. from the Hebrew University and her Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry and Cancer Nanomedicine from the University of London. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston working with the late Judah Folkman on Vascular and Cancer Biology. (Read the full CV here and here).

RSF's multidisciplinary research focuses on the mechanisms and players involved in tumor-host interactions. Using this approach, she identified P-Selectin as an immune checkpoint in brain cancer-microglia crosstalk. Using its antibody, she initiated a clinical trial treating 30 glioblastoma and melanoma brain metastases patients. Her pioneering research laid the foundations for using polymeric nanoparticles for the simultaneous delivery of multiple active entities such as chemotherapeutic and anti-stromal drugs with immunogenic peptides, si/mi/mRNA, to tumor cells and their microenvironment. To evaluate their efficacy, safety, and clinical translatability, she establishes preclinical3D-bioprinted cancer models that mimic the clinical scenario, which is the basis for an ongoing 80 patients trial.

Physiology Pharmacology
Faculty of Medicine, Room 607
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel
Tel.: (+972) 3640 74 27 (Office) (+972) 547 70 92 53 (Cell)

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @RSFLab