Researcher Profile Form First National Pediatric Brain Tumor Research Meeting March 9, 2025 - Jerusalem
Researcher: Prof. Ofra Benny
Current Role & Affiliation
Title/Position: Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Institution: Hebrew University
Email: ofra.benny@mail.huji.ac.il
Phone: 052-8461462
Prof. Benny leads The Laboratory for Nanomedicine and The Tumor Microenvironment at the School of Pharmacy and Faculty of Medicine.
Research Focus
● Drug delivery systems
● Tumor-on-a-chip models
● Medical devices
● Anti-cancer drug development
Current Projects Related to Pediatric Brain Tumors
● Personalized therapy in ex vivo models
● Development of novel drugs for pediatric cancers
Laboratory/Research Resources
● Nanomedicine platforms
● Tumor modeling technologies
Collaboration Interests
● Drug delivery innovations
● Personalized cancer therapy
Selected Achievements
● Over 60 publications
● Founder of 4 spin-off companies
What You Can Offer Potential Collaborators
● Expertise in nanomedicine and drug delivery systems
● Advanced tumor models for drug testing
Selected relevant Publications
1. Cohen T, et.al. Elongated Particles Show a Preferential Uptake in Invasive Cancer Cells. Nanomaterials (Basel). 2024 Nov 25;14(23):1891.
2. Goldstein Y, et.al. Particle uptake in cancer cells can predict malignancy and drug resistance using machine learning. Sci Adv. 2024 May 31;10(22):eadj4370.
3. Steinberg E, et.al. A fully 3D-printed versatile tumor-on-a-chip allows multi-drug screening and correlation with clinical outcomes for personalized medicine. Commun Biol. 2023 Nov 13;6(1):1157.c
Keywords
Drug Delivery, Tumor-on-a-Chip, Personalized Therapy, Nanomedicine
Brief Bio
Ofra Benny is an Associate Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) and the Head of the Lab for Nanomedicine and Tumor icroenvironment. She is the Director of the Pharmaceutical Science Section at The Institute for Drug Research at HUJI. Her Multidisciplinary research focuses on nanomedicine,3D-printing and microfluidics for drug delivery, and AI based diagnostics in cancer. Prof. Benny holds ERCstarter and ERC-POC grants focused on biomechanical interactions of nanoparticles and cancer cells for personalized therapy. Her research led to many patents as well as publications in leading journals such as Nature Biotechnology and Science Advances. Prof. Benny is the Director of The Fraunhofer Innovation Platform for Drug Discovery and Delivery at HUJI (FIP_DD@HUJI), a center for GermanyIsrael collaborations. Her postdoctoral training was done in The
Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital in Judah Folkman’s Lab.
