Isaac Witz was the most veteran cancer researcher at Tel Aviv University. He authored over 230 papers in leading academic journals, edited 11 books, and wrote many book sections. He was a member of several scientific societies and associations in immunology and cancer research and served as a visiting professor in American and Austrian institutes, as well as at the
Karolinska Institute in
Stockholm. He was the editor of several journals in cancer research. In his very beginning as a principal investigator, he headed a team that tried to understand why cancer patients' bodies do not reject their tumors. He then pioneered the research field of the Tumor Microenvironment (TME) being the Founding-President of the International Cancer Microenvironment Society. He organized and presided over seven international conferences focusing on TME:
Sea of Galilee (1995),
Vienna (2002),
Prague (2004),
Florence (2007),
Versailles (2009),
Suzhou (2012), and
Tel Aviv (2015). Witz's scientific career of over fifty years of focusing on the cancer ecosystem was pioneered in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the groundbreaking discovery that humoral immune components (
antibodies) localized in the microenvironment of cancer cells and coated these cells. These antibodies affect cancer growth and progression to
metastasis by a variety of molecular pathways. These studies coupled with similar findings that cells of the immune system penetrate the microenvironment of solid tumors and interact with cancer cells, formed the basis for the Tumor Immune Microenvironment (TIM) research field. Ways to modify and normalize TIM led to the development of contemporary life-saving immunotherapy modalities. Aiming to explore the
pathobiology of the multifaceted cellular and molecular interactions occurring in the TME, Witz, in the 1980s shifted his attention to the entire spectrum of cells and molecules in the TME. He provided the first conclusive in-vivo evidence that cancer variants originating from a common clonal ancestor and having an identical load of
oncogenes, manifested a diverse malignant
phenotype depending on their microenvironment. In the view of the complexity of the interactions of cancer cells with other components of the TME, Witz advocates conceptual changes in the way of analyzing the cancer ecosystem, away from
reductionism to a more holistic approach. As of 2023, aiming to develop novel therapeutic methods Witz's laboratory investigates the cellular and molecular mechanisms behind the progression of disseminating cancer cells to metastasis, the most lethal manifestation of cancer. He studies the bilateral interactions between cancer cells and other cells in the TME being reflected by reprogramming of
gene expression of each interaction partner. These cellular cross talks play a pivotal role in the "junction of decision": cancer progression; cancer regression or cancer dormancy. ==Awards==