Liron Grossmann is a physician-scientist at Sheba Medical Center. As a physician, he cares for children with cancer, mainly neuroblastoma: a childhood cancer of the developing sympathetic nervous system, the one people usually call the “fight or flight” system.
It can be a very aggressive cancer. After treatment it returns in about 50% of cases, and when it does, mortality is 80%. For him, as a clinician, that is like flipping a coin: he cannot tell parents that their child is going to live. That is what drives his research.
As a scientist, he runs his own lab at Sheba. There, using state-of-the-art technology, his team studies the cancer cells responsible for the disease coming back, one cell at a time. They have already identified and characterised those cells, and they are now working on new drugs that target them specifically, with the goal of drastically improving survival from this cancer. “Because to me, 50% is not acceptable,” he says.
He tells it in his own words in the video: the original, in English, with English subtitles.