Eran Elinav

Elinav earned a M.D. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1999. Following an internship and residency in internal medicine at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in 2000–2004.

He served as a senior physician-scientist at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center Institute of Gastroenterology and Liver Disease in 2005–2009.^[2]

In 2009 Elinav earned a Ph.D. in immunology from the Weizmann Institute of Science, advised by Zelig Eshhar, after developing the Chimeric Antigen Receptor Regulatory T cell (CAR-Treg) approach,^[7] as treatment of inflammatory bowel disease and autoimmunity. In 2009-2012 he followed by a post-doc at Yale University, advised by Richard Anthony Flavell, in which he discovered the NLRP6 inflammasome.^[8]

In 2012 Elinav moved to the Weizmann Institute of Science and in 2016 was made a professor.^[3]He heads the Institute of Microbiome research^[9] and the Center of Host-Pathogen Interaction Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Microbiome & Cancer Division at the DKFZ.^[4] Since 2022, he heads the Department of Systems Immunology, Weizmann Institute of Science.

Elinav studies the molecular basis of host-microbiota interactions,^[10] and their effects of diet,^[11][12] environmental factors,^[13] immune function^[14] and host genetics^[15] on the intestinal microbiome and associated multi-factorial metabolic,^[16][17] inflammatory,^[18] malignant^[19] and neurogenerative disease.^[20][21]His most-cited papers have more than 2,000 cites each.^[22]

Elinav developed precision microbiota interventions, including Personalized Nutrition,^[23][24] Precision Probiotics,^[25] small molecule ″postbiotics″,^[12] Phage Therapy,^{[26] [27]} autologous fecal microbiome transplantation,^[28][29] Vaginal Microbiome Transplantation (VMT) ^[30][31] and gut epithelial^[32][33] interventions.

Personalized Nutrition

In 2014 Elinav discovered that people consuming identical foods and additives, such as non-nutritive sweeteners,^[23][34] general foods^[24] and bread,^[35][36] feature a unique and personalized glycemic response, thereby potentially explaining the lack of uniform metabolic responses to generalized dietary approaches. ^[37]Personalized dietary recommendations,^[38] based on individualized dietary, ^[39]clinical and microbiota data, improved pre-diabetes control.^[24] He similarly showed, that consumption of probiotics^[40] leads to a person-specific colonization resistance and physiological patterns.^[41]

Nutritional timing and the Microbiota

Elinav discovered, that the gut microbiota features a compositional and functional diurnal activity during a 24-hour cycle, which is dictated by host and environmental factors, mainly by the timing in food consumption. ^[42][43] These microbiota diurnal activities are tightly coordinated with the host gastrointestinal and systemic circadian activity,^[44] while disruption of circadian activity by jet-lag^[45] or shift work may lead to alterations in the microbiota behavior, which contribute to the development of common metabolic,^[43] immune^[18] and liver diseases.^[46][44]

Elinav was awarded the Rappaport prize for biomedical research in 2015,^[47] the Levinson award for basic science research in 2016,^[48] the Landau prize of Immunology in 2018^[49] and was inducted to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2021.^[50]