Yoram Palti, MD, PhD, a biophysicist and longtime member of AACR who founded the Novocure oncology company, died January 11, 2026. He was 88 years old.
Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1937, Palti received his master’s, doctoral, and medical degrees from The Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School and served his residency there. His doctoral thesis was on distribution of electrical fields in nerve fibers.
He became a professor of physiology and biophysics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and served from 1982 to 1993 as head of the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences, the research arm of the Technion Medical School.
Palti founded Novocure in 2000 and set up a laboratory in his basement to conduct research on the potential of electrical fields as a cancer treatment.
“I regressed 40 years back to my doctoral research on electric fields,” using electrical impulses—which he called Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields)—to disrupt the growth of tumors, he said in a 2025 interview. “Nobody understood what I was doing,” he added.
He and others published their results on TTFields and glioblastoma in 2007. Novocure’s TTFields systems have been approved in the United States to treat glioblastoma, non-small cell lung cancer, plural mesothelioma, and, most recently, pancreatic cancer.
Palti was awarded the Israel Prize in Entrepreneurship and Technological Innovation in 2022.
He was chief technology officer of Novocure, serving as a consultant until his death, and was a director from 2002 to 2018. He was a member of AACR since 2004.
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Professor Yoram Palti was a visionary and pioneer in the fields of electrophysiology and oncology. He was insatiably curious, humble, kind and driven. We at Novocure are proud to carry his legacy forward. On a personal note, Dr. Palti's kindness towards me as a young investment analyst working on the early financings of Novocure was extraordinary. Yoram knew that it would take a global team from around the world to make his ideas a practical reality. And he welcomed everyone to join him. His kindness led me to join Novocure, and to this day motivates me to help as many people as possible.