Ayelet Erez

Origins and early life

Ayelet Erez is an Israeli physician and scientist, dean of the medical school at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Work and career

She took her BSc and MD at the Technion in Haifa, trained in paediatrics at Sheba, earned a PhD in cancer genetics at Tel Aviv University and did a postdoctoral fellowship in inherited metabolic disorders at Baylor, then returned to Israel to build her laboratory; she co-founded an oncogenetic clinic at Schneider Children's Medical Center, where she still sees families weekly. Her work follows the metabolic changes that cancer forces on the body around it.

In July 2026 her laboratory published in Cancer Research, with Yarden Ariav as lead author, that sildenafil limits the use cancer cells make of cholesterol, which they need in order to leave the primary tumour and settle elsewhere; in mice it reduced metastasis in breast, lung and colon models, and among more than forty thousand male cancer patients in the Clalit records, taking sildenafil together with a statin went with a thirty-one per cent lower risk of death within five years.

The researchers state plainly that this does not show that Viagra treats cancer, and that patients should not take it outside a clinical trial. She received the 2026 Pezcoller-EACR Women in Cancer Research Award.