The woman who save lives when the prognosis is poor
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Prof. Michal Lotem: Immunotherapy will become the main platform for treating melanoma
Hadassah’s Prof. Michal Lotem, a trailblazer in melanoma research and healing, is treating her patients with a personalized protocol that only a handful of oncology centers around the globe are able to offer.
When her patients come to her with Stage IV metastatic melanoma, where standard treatments have failed, Prof. Lotem uses a cutting-edge immunotherapy protocol called adoptive cell therapy (ACT). The treatment involves extracting immune cells from a patient’s tumor and expanding their number into the millions to make them more powerful cancer killers. They are then re-injected into the patient, who is now armed to fight the disease with a greatly enhanced immune system.
Prof. Lotem, head of Hadassah’s Center for Melanoma and Cancer Immunotherapy, tweaks the protocol based on her years of experience and the patient’s disease pattern. In this way, she saves lives when the prognosis is poor. As she explains: “We have to take into account each person’s unique mutation landscape because each person’s cancer, though it exhibits common attributes, has its own profile.” Prof. Lotem also does not believe that doctors should tell patients they have x number of months to live–or as she calls it, “practice prophecy.” She focuses rather on trying to help them live. Last year, the Hadassah Medical Organization was awarded a three-year, $337,500 grant from the Washington-based Melanoma Research Alliance for developing a protein that will make immune cells better cancer killers.
Prof. Lotem and her team at Hadassah began by first administering personalized vaccines to their advanced-stage melanoma patients, derived from the patient’s own tumor cells, following surgery. Then came the next generation of vaccines, made with genetically engineered tumor lines. As Prof. Lotem explains, the HMO vaccine was designed as a preventive treatment–as a memory of the disease for the immune system so it could recognize the enemy and, therefore, prevent a recurrence.
As Prof. Lotem brings out, “the world is now convinced that immunotherapy is the way to go.” She believes that immunotherapy “will become the main platform for treating melanoma as well as other types of cancer.”
For more than 100 years, Hadassah (www.hadassah-med.com) has been a leader in medicine and nursing in Israel, laying the foundation and setting the standards for the country’s modern health care system. The majority of medical breakthroughs in Israel have taken place there. With more than 130 departments and clinics, Hadassah-Ein Kerem provides Israel’s most advanced diagnostic and therapeutic services for the local and national population and a significant number of international patients.
