Sima Lev

Sima Lev (סימה לב) is an Israeli biologist and the Joyce and Ben B. Eisenberg Professorial Chair of Molecular Cell Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She looks to uncover the mechanisms that drive the development of triple-negative breast cancer, and to identify new therapeutic strategies. She has discovered several novel human genes including PYK2, Nir1, Nir2, and Nir3.

Early life and education
Lev is from Israel. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degree at Tel Aviv University. She moved to the Weizmann Institute of Science for her doctoral research, where she studied ATTB sites involved in the recombination of bacteriophages.

Research and career
The signalling pathways that determine cell growth are impacted by environmental cues, including nutrients and growth factors. Lev studies how these signalling networks behave in normal and cancerous cells.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) impacts one in five breast cancer patients. Despite its prevalence, there are no targeted therapeutic agents, and chemotherapy is the only option. As a result, chemo-resistance is a major challenge for the treatment of TNBC. Chemoresistance gives rise to advanced metastatic disease. Lev has investigated new molecular targets for TNBC that regulate the metastasis of TNBC. She combines bioinformatics with transcriptomics to identify the signalling pathways that drive the progression of tumours.

Multi-modal combination therapies are often used in cancer treatment to leverage different treatment approaches and reduce the likelihood that drug-resistant cancer cells develop. Lev combines high-throughput screening with a library of chemotherapies and small molecule inhibitors to identify combination therapies for TNBC.

Lev develops reverse phase protein arrays for the characterisation of cell signalling. She monitors how signalling pathways respond dynamically in response to stimuli and other perturbations. She has studied tyrosine kinase PYK2, a protein-coding gene whose downstream pathways determine proliferation and migration.

Small vehicles that are below 100 nm in size are known as exosomes. Exosomes are produced by cancer cells, impact disease progression and serve as biomarkers for prognosis. Lev has studied the exosomes of TNBC patients, looking to understand how they respond to treatments and the mechanisms that underpin their production.