Last year’s stunning $12 billion acquisition of Kite Pharma, which commercialized made-in-Israel CAR-T technology to train a patient’s own immune system to attack lymphoma cells, has put the spotlight on Israeli cancer research.

Immunotherapy treatments like CAR-T hold enormous promise for addressing – and in some cases even curing – cancer, but they don’t work for everyone. The same problem crops up with other cancer-fighting drugs: Because every person’s chemical and biological makeup varies, determining the exact amounts and combinations of therapies for a specific patient can be a challenge. A tiny variance can spell the difference between life and death.

Enter personalized medicine, which uses sophisticated methods to screen patients and match them with the right medicine for their particular illness.

Israel has become a hot spot for the development of personalized medicine, in part due to local expertise in processing and manipulating data, digital-health consultant Neta Kela Madar tells ISRAEL21c.

“When we’re talking about screening data, protecting data, and building a high-tech platform for data, that’s where Israel’s value is,” explains Madar, who has a PhD in immunology.

Jennifer Yarden, CEO of Curewize, a Yokne’am-based company developing diagnostic systems for personalized medicine, adds that Israel has established a “personalized medicine ecosystem that includes world-class research institutes, large health/medical organizations, technology-transfer groups and favorable government policies towards innovation and startup companies.”

(via Israel21c)

[Photo: Wall Street Journal / YouTube ]