Nervous System and Brain Disorders

Dr. Avraham Ashkenazi

Dr. Ashkenazi, PhD, from the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the School of Medicine, completed his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science and his postdoctoral training at Cambridge University. He was awarded the Young Investigator Award by the European Biochemical Society and the Azrieli Fellowship for excellent new faculty in Israel. He is part of the Taube-Koret Global Collaboration in Neurodegenerative Diseases.

https://www.ashkenazilab.com/

Autophagy in Huntington and Parkinson’s disease

Dr. Ashkenazi’s long-term scientific goal is to identify mechanisms that contribute to neuronal survival To achieve this goal, his laboratory combines stem cell technology, primary neurons, animal models, and biochemical and cellular approaches. Dr. Ashkenazi’s pioneering work on autophagy (selfeating) revealed how this cell survival pathway breaks down protein clumps (aggregates), and reduces toxicity in models of triplet repeat expansion diseases, such as Huntington’s and Parkinson's disease. He was the first to describe a biological function of triplet repeats encoding polyglutamine stretches in regulating autophagy in health and in Huntington’s disease. Dr. Ashkenazi’s research opens several new venues of understanding protein degradation pathways and the biology of neurodegenerative diseases. Moreover, his research has the potential to reveal new druggable targets that can be utilized to control a range of neurological disorders caused by aggregateprone proteins