Polina Stepensky

Origins and early life

Polina Stepensky was born in 1967 in Vinnytsia, in Soviet Ukraine, the only child of her parents, and began medical school there at the age of nineteen.

Work and career

She has recalled that being an only child was common in Jewish families in the Soviet Union, and that her father told her she had to achieve two hundred percent to be judged at one hundred, “because we are Jewish”. In 1990, halfway through her studies, she left for Israel with her husband Igor, and her parents followed a few months later, among the hundreds of thousands of Jews who came from the former Soviet Union. With limited Hebrew and no English, she first trained as a nurse at the University of Haifa, then won a place at the Hadassah–Hebrew University School of Medicine in Jerusalem, paying her way as a pediatric nurse at Hadassah.

She graduated in 1998, trained in pediatrics and pediatric hemato-oncology at Hadassah, and spent 2008 at the University of Minnesota's blood and marrow transplant program before building a pediatric transplant team in Jerusalem. With the geneticist Orly Elpeleg, her team identified six genetic mutations behind life-threatening immune disorders and was the first in the world to cure children carrying them by transplantation, one such case being reported in the journal Blood in 2015.

After seeing CAR-T cell therapy in New York in 2017, she persuaded Hadassah to develop its own with the Bar-Ilan University immunologist Cyrille Cohen, as head of its department of bone marrow transplantation and cancer immunotherapy. By 2023 more than 90 percent of the 74 multiple myeloma patients treated with this Israeli-made therapy at Hadassah had responded, and the Jerusalem Post named her that year among its fifty most influential Jews.