There are many ways to treat cancer: drugs, radiation, surgery and immunotherapy. NovoCure added an option that, when first proposed, sounded almost unthinkable: electric fields.
The technology it developed, known as Tumor Treating Fields, or TTFields, uses alternating electric fields to disrupt the division of cancer cells. The non-invasive treatment does not necessarily replace existing therapies but is administered alongside them, using arrays of electrodes placed on the body and connected to a portable device. More than two decades after the idea was born in a basement in Haifa, it is being used by cancer patients around the world and has received FDA approval for several types of cancer.
NovoCure
Behind the idea was Prof. Yoram Palti, whose connection to the Technion began decades before NovoCure was founded. Born in Haifa, Palti studied medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Hadassah, earning both an MD and a PhD. His doctoral research examined the effects of electric fields on living tissue. After completing postdoctoral work in the United States and returning to the Hebrew University, he was invited in 1971 to help establish the Technion’s medical school. He later became one of the founders of the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, served as a professor of physiology and biophysics and headed the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences. Until his death in January 2026 at the age of 89, he held the title of professor emeritus at the faculty.
In 2000, by then an established researcher, Palti returned to an idea that had stayed with him since his doctoral work. He pulled out the thesis he had written some 40 years earlier and set up a small laboratory in the basement of his Haifa home to investigate whether electric fields could be harnessed to fight solid tumors.
The company began with just a handful of employees. “Nobody understood what I was doing,” Palti later recalled of the period in which he developed the concept. But the early experiments showed that electric fields at certain frequencies could interfere with cancer-cell division, and that same year he founded NovoCure.
To understand the innovation, it helps to think of cell division as a delicate mechanical process. Inside a dividing cell, structures made of electrically charged proteins form to pull apart the genetic material and distribute it between two daughter cells. TTFields exert electrical forces on these components, disrupting that process. Because cancer cells divide rapidly and have electrical and structural characteristics that differ from healthy cells, the frequency can be tuned to have a greater effect on them.
The treatment is not free of side effects. In particular, it can cause skin irritation and other reactions where the electrode arrays are attached. But unlike some drug-based cancer treatments, it does not produce the same kind of systemic toxicity.
The journey from a Haifa basement to clinical medicine was gradual. The first patients were treated in a clinical trial in 2003, and in 2011 the technology received its first FDA approval for recurrent glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. In 2015, approval followed for patients newly diagnosed with glioblastoma, and that same year NovoCure went public on Nasdaq.
In 2019, the technology received U.S. approval under a dedicated pathway for use alongside chemotherapy in mesothelioma, and in 2024 another approval followed for a specific form of metastatic lung cancer. Throughout the company’s expansion, its research and development center remained in Haifa.
“We knew from the beginning that the company’s development center and its knowledge would remain in Israel,” then-CEO Asaf Danziger told ynet.
In 2026, NovoCure reached one of its most significant milestones. In a Phase III trial called PANOVA-3, involving 571 patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer, adding the Optune Pax device to chemotherapy increased median overall survival from 14.2 months to 16.2 months, a statistically significant improvement.
In February, the FDA approved the device, making it the first treatment approved in the United States in nearly 30 years for the disease at this stage. In June, it also received CE approval in Europe. As of the end of June 2026, 5,128 patients worldwide were actively being treated with TTFields technology, including 285 patients using Optune Pax in the United States.
NovoCure continues to investigate the technology across additional types and stages of cancer. Not every trial succeeds, however, and each potential expansion requires its own clinical evidence.
That is precisely what makes the journey of Palti’s idea so remarkable: from an old doctoral thesis pulled from the shelf and a makeshift laboratory in a Haifa basement to an international oncology treatment platform.
In 2022, Palti was awarded the Israel Prize for entrepreneurship and technological innovation. Four years later, just months after his death, the FDA approval in pancreatic cancer added another chapter to his life’s work — one that began with a simple but unconventional question: Can electricity be used to fight cancer?
