Gal Cafri, PhD

Dr. Cafri specialized in tumor immunology and cancer immunotherapy. For the last 17 years, Dr. Cafri studies the interactions between tumors and the immune system. He began his career working on chimeric molecules to enhance vaccine activity against skin cancer at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Later on, Dr. Cafri spent 4.5 years at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, specializing in treating patients with immune cells directed against cancer mutations.

During his time at the NCI, Dr. Cafri was responsible for developing two clinical trials aiming to vaccinate cancer patients with their tumor mutations. Dr. Cafri also developed a method to isolate tumor-specific immune cells from patients’ blood – a technique that can bypass the need for tumor resection to develop effective cancer immunotherapies. Dr. Cafri lab develops T-cell receptor therapy for patients with common epithelial cancers and infectious diseases and innovative mRNA engineering approaches to reprogram human T-cells.