Michal Schwartz

Origins and early life

Michal Schwartz was born in Tel Aviv on 1 January 1950 and first came to the Weizmann Institute of Science at eleven, with a club for young science enthusiasts. She took a degree in chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1972 and a doctorate in immunology at the Weizmann Institute in 1977, then studied nerve regeneration at the University of Michigan before joining the Weizmann faculty in 1980, becoming full professor in 1998.

Work and career

Against the prevailing view among brain researchers, she showed that immune cells are needed to repair the injured central nervous system, and coined the term “protective autoimmunity” for this beneficial response. Her team then found that the immune system supports the healthy brain and that its decline is linked to dementia, work for which she received the Israel Prize in life sciences in 2023. From these findings she proposed treating Alzheimer's disease by briefly releasing the PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint, and co-founded ImmunoBrain Checkpoint, which licensed her work from the Weizmann Institute.

Its first trial, in 40 patients with early Alzheimer's disease in the United Kingdom, Israel and the Netherlands, found the antibody safe at every dose, according to results published in Nature Medicine in 2026. She had received the EMET Prize in 2019, and the Jerusalem Post named her in 2023 among its fifty most influential Jews. No source states her Jewish identity in so many words, though she has said that her father is a Holocaust survivor and that she is the sixth generation on her mother's side.

Recognition

She is here under the Israeli presumption the site adopted on 7 September 2026 and extended on 15 October 2026 — a Hebrew given name, an Ashkenazi surname, birth in Israel and a strong tie, here the Israel Prize and a company built on her research — which is a presumption and not a declaration, and which any contrary source overturns.