The Generative Brain

Sheba Medical Center (Chaim Sheba, Tel Hashomer), Department of Neurology

The Department of Neurology at Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer (Ramat Gan, Israel) is a general hospital neurology department that treats stroke, memory disorders, Parkinson disease, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy, inside Sheba's Brain and Nervous System Health Division. Sheba is one of the clinical sites of the Tel Aviv University medical faculty. For this atlas it matters as the sponsor of NCT02480725, a 2015 registry entry for a CSF thrombin study in CJD with the Goettingen prion centre as collaborator, which has never been updated. Its long-serving head Joab Chapman co-authored about 25 papers from 2009 to 2024 on E200K genetic CJD in Israel, many using the Israeli National CJD database. It is a separate hospital from Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (org-tel-aviv-smc). The official department page could only be seen through search excerpts, so current leadership is not fully confirmed. Information only.

Key facts

  • The official Sheba page describes a neurology department that admits people for diagnosis and treatment of stroke, memory disorders, Parkinson disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and other conditions, within a Brain and Nervous System Health Division that also has a Stroke and Neurovascular Center and a Multiple Sclerosis Center; no CJD or prion clinic is named.
  • Sheba Medical Center was founded in 1948 as Israel's first military hospital at Tel HaShomer, Ramat Gan, and is named after Chaim Sheba, its director from 1953; reported bed numbers range from about 1,580 to almost 2,000.
  • Tel Aviv University's medical faculty names Chaim Sheba Medical Center as one of its four clinical sites.
  • Joab Chapman is described as chair of the Sheba Department of Neurology since 2002 and holder of the Robert and Martha Harden Chair at the Tel Aviv University medical faculty; the official page excerpts list him as director, though a contact box on the same page names Nicola Maggio, whom profile pages call deputy head and the Sheba page calls epilepsy clinic director.
  • Sheba Medical Center is the lead sponsor of NCT02480725 (local id 1702-14 SMC), registered June 2015, which planned to measure CSF thrombin activity in CJD, other dementias and controls in Prof. Chapman's laboratory, with the Goettingen Prion Referral Center under Prof. Zerr as collaborator; status is Unknown and no results are posted.
  • NCT02480725 is the only CJD or prion study on ClinicalTrials.gov with Sheba as sponsor.
  • The department's thrombin research group published a CSF thrombin and activated protein C assay in 2021 and a 2015 review on thrombin and the PAR1 receptor at synapses; neither covers prion disease.
  • A Europe PMC affiliation search finds 33 Sheba-affiliated papers on CJD, prions or E200K from 1990 to 2026, mostly 2009 to 2024 clinical studies of Israeli E200K genetic CJD on MRI, EEG, sleep, seizures, CSF tau, homozygous E200K, onset age and sensory signs.
  • In this work Joab Chapman's affiliation reads Department of Neurology, The Sagol Neuroscience Center, and Chaim Sheba Medical Center; his co-authors are mostly at Barzilai, Assaf Harofeh and Hadassah, so the E200K research is a multi-centre Israeli network rather than a Sheba-only programme.
  • Several of these papers draw on the Israeli National CJD database, which lists 423 E200K patients of Libyan ancestry and 27 of Turkish ancestry (2022) and, in a 2024 paper, 729 CJD patients compared for sensory symptoms (84 with, 645 without).
  • CSF tau has been a recurring marker in the group's work: it tracked cortical MRI involvement in 44 E200K patients (2016) and disease duration in 69 familial CJD patients (2019).
  • In the 2026 Israeli framework for presymptomatic PRNP testing of at-risk relatives, Sheba is represented by its Danek Gertner Institute of Human Genetics, not by the neurology department.

Timeline

  1. 1948Sheba Medical Center founded at Tel HaShomer as Israel's first military hospital.
  2. 2002Joab Chapman becomes chair of the Department of Neurology (speaker bio).
  3. 2009First of the Sheba co-authored E200K CJD clinical papers (MRI of the cerebellar syndrome).
  4. 2015Review on thrombin and PAR1 in synaptic plasticity by the Sheba and Tel Aviv University group.
  5. 2015NCT02480725 registered with Sheba as sponsor and Goettingen as collaborator; record not updated since.
  6. 2016CSF tau and cortical MRI paper in E200K CJD.
  7. 2021CSF thrombin and activated protein C assay published, without prion samples.
  8. 2022Turkish versus Libyan Jewish E200K comparison from the Israeli National CJD database.
  9. 2023Sensory disturbances in CJD paper (print 2024-03).
  10. 2025Estimated completion date of NCT02480725 passes with no update.
  11. 2026Israeli presymptomatic genetic testing framework published, with Sheba genetics authors.
Sources for this page