From Ultra-Orthodox Schooling to a Cancer-Fighting Startup

Sheiki Stauber, a physicist at Jerusalem biotech startup Alpha-TAU, is helping develop a radioactive capsule designed to destroy tumors from inside the body. The company’s approach aims to replace external radiation with a tiny source placed directly in the cancerous growth, and Stauber says the effort could eventually treat tumors that currently have no effective therapy. The product, called Dart, is being tested clinically in hospitals in Israel and the United States.

Stauber, who is not yet 40, says he sees no contradiction between his Orthodox Jewish faith and his scientific work. He works mainly on clinical trials, helping plan treatments, supervising procedures in hospitals, ensuring radiation safety, and analyzing results afterward. Alpha-TAU’s technology was first discovered by founder and physicist Prof. Itzhak Kelzov, who died about a year ago, together with a student at Tel Aviv University and cancer researcher Prof. Yona Keisari. The system uses radium-224, a radioactive isotope that can destroy tumors with minimal damage to surrounding tissue.

The company has reported encouraging data in skin cancer and early interim results in pancreatic cancer. In a trial in Israel and Canada, 91% of pancreatic cancer patients responded, meaning their tumors at least stopped growing, and 18% showed a significant reduction in tumor length. Stauber says the main targets are skin, pancreatic, and liver cancers, especially those that respond poorly to today’s radiation methods.

Stauber’s path to science was highly unusual. Raised in Jerusalem’s Bayit VeGan neighborhood, born in Switzerland to a family with working parents, he studied in an extremely strict Haredi school that used belts and sticks and rejected state funding, and later attended elite yeshivas including Ateret Yisrael and Mir. He entered academia after marriage, completed elementary school material at age 29 in one day, then studied physics at the Hebrew University. He says his interest in science was encouraged at home and that he once became fascinated by quantum theory and Newton’s laws. On education policy, he supports giving parents more choice, says state-Haredi schools are growing, and argues that children should be matched to the right framework rather than pressured politically.