My lab has worked in the past mostly on diabetes and tissue regeneration in the pancreas, but in recent years much of our focus has shifted to a new technology that we are developing, for non-invasive monitoring of cell death in humans, based on circulating DNA. A major application for the method is the detection of cell death in the brain, both during normal development and in pathological conditions. Our preliminary results on this include the demonstration of neuronal cell death in the plasma of patients with ALS, oligodendrocyte cell death in the plasma of patients with relapsing multiple sclerosis, and sensitive detection of brain cell death in patients that suffered head trauma or brain ischemia. The work is done in collaboration with several neurologists from Hadassah Medical Center.