Israel Vlodavsky received his B.Sc (1968) and M.Sc. (1970) from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his Ph.D. (1975) from the Weizmann Institute, followed by postdoctoral training at UCLA and UCSF (1975-1979). He then established the Tumor Biology Research Unit of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center and served as a Visiting Prof. at Harvard Medical School, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Australian National University. In 2002, he was recruited to the Technion, where he established the Cancer & Vascular Biology Research Center of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. Currently, he is a member of the Technion Integrated Cancer Center (TICC) and head of the Tumor Biology Research Group. His research has been published in over 500 papers (51,125 citations, H index = 121) and is being presented at leading international conferences. Vlodavsky was among the first to realize that the extracellular matrix (ECM) plays an active role in orchestrating cellular responses to normal and pathological situations. His discovery of the ECM as a reservoir for bioactive molecules provides the basis for the current appreciation of the tumor microenvironment and its significance in cancer progression and treatment. A major achievement of Israel Vlodavsky is the cloning and characterization of heparanase, the predominant enzyme degrading heparan sulfate.