Dr. Miki Rahat is an associate professor at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and the director of the Research Laboratories at the Carmel Medical Center. Dr. Rahat also heads the Immunotherapy Lab at the Carmel Medical Center, which is affiliated to the Faculty of Medicine.
Dr. Rahat received her B.Sc. in Biology at the Department of Biology at the Technion, her M.Sc. in molecular immunology also at the Department of Biology at the Technion, and her D.Sc. in Biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion. Dr. Rahat then joined the Immunology Research lab at Carmel Medical Center, as a post-doctoral fellow in a joint project with the department of Internal Medicine, and later on stayed at the Immunology Research lab as a Senior Investigator. In 2012 she was appointed first as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, and then advanced to Associate Professor. Dr. Rahat has always been interested in tumor immunology and biomarkers for cancer, focusing on the interaction between macrophages and tumor cells, and the effect of hypoxia on this interaction. In recent years she has focused on the study of EMMPRIN/CD147, which is an important protein that regulates these interactions and promotes angiogenesis and invasiveness/metastasis. Now she has developed a passive and an active vaccine approaches to target EMMPRIN/CD147, and showed that these vaccines can reduce tumor growth and metastasis, and turn ‘cold’ tumors into ‘hot’ tumors that regain the ability to eradicate tumor cells.
