Prof. Dan Frenkel is head of neuroimmunology laboratory at the department of neurobiology at Tel Aviv University. His laboratory research focus is on glial-neuronal cell interactions to clarify their role in neurological diseases, both in culture and in animal models of such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. His lab combines approaches such as molecular biology as well as immunological approaches to shed light on the genes and proteins involved in glial cell function, in particular microglia and astrocyte. They have developed novel approaches to isolate adult microglia and astrocytes from mice and to investigate their genetic and proteins profile that relate to pathological condition during aging. Furthermore, they aim define the link between glia function to cognition using different behavioral tests. He was awarded career development award for an outstanding young scientist from the Human Frontier Science Program Organization for studying reactive microglia in Alzheimer’s disease. In 2016 he was awarded Mary K. Iacocca Visiting Faculty Fellowship and spent a year as visiting scientist at Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School aiming to study the link between diabetes to neuroinflammation. He has been published in an array of scientific journals including the Journal of clinical investigation, Nature Annals of Neurology, the Proceeding National Academy of Science, Nature communication, FASEB, Neurobiology of Aging and Neurobiology of disease. He has 4 granted patents to treat neurodegenerative diseases.
