Prof. Shalev Itzkovitz
Rappaport Prize for Promising Researcher
Prof. Shalev Itzkovitz is a systems biologist studying how single cells work together within the tissues of our body to collectively achieve physiological goals. He focuses on the main metabolic tissues, the liver, the pancreas, and the intestine. These tissues are composed of repeating units that exhibit spatial gradients of oxygen, nutrients, and signaling molecules. Prof. Itzkovitz studies how cells at different locations within these tissue units adapt their functions to match the local microenvironment. He combines various technologies to measure the complete expression profiles of thousands of single cells with tools to spatially map these cells’ coordinates within the tissue.
These include single molecule transcript imaging in tissues, a technology he pioneered that enables visualizing single mRNA molecules of any gene of interest in intact mammalian organs. Using these approaches, Prof. Itzkovitz reconstructed spatial cell atlases of the liver and the intestine, revealing that cells such as the liver hepatocytes and intestinal enterocytes, which were thought to be uniform, in fact vary dramatically in their function. Prof. Itzkovitz also uncovered new cell types, including insulin-producing intestinal cells in the human fetus and immune-modulating secretory cells in the gut. Prof. Itzkovitz studies the implications of zonated cellular functions to pathologies such as diabetes, liver fibrosis, inflammatory bowel diseases, and cancer.
