Abraham Zangen

Abraham Zangen (אברהם צנגן, born 1969) is an Israeli professor of neuroscience, head of the brain stimulation and behavior lab and chair of the psychobiology brain program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

Biography
Abraham Zangen was born in Ramat Gan, Israel. He earned his B.Sc. in pharmacology from the Hebrew University and his PhD from the Bar Ilan University in Israel in 1999. He then did a postdoc at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) until 2003. In 2003, he returned to Israel and established a laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, attaining the rank of associate professor in 2010. In 2012, he joined the faculty of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and was made a full professor in 2015.

Zangen is married to Rachel, with whom he has six children.

Scientific career
Zangen studies neuroplasticity in the brain reward system and the effects of brain stimulation on neuroplasticity in psychiatric disorders including depression, addiction and attention deficits.

During his postdoc at the NIH, Zangen was part of a team that invented a magnetic coil called the "H coil" for use in transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS); the coil allows deeper penetration of the magnetic field into the brain and the procedure wherein the H-coil was applied to TMS became known as "Deep TMS". The H-coil was patented by the NIH in 2002, and was licensed by the startup company Brainsway in 2003. Zangen has continued to do research on applications for Deep TMS and consults for BrainsWay.

At the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, Zangen worked on reward processing on animal models and learned that electrical stimulation of a rat's brain can induce neurochemical changes opposite of those induced by repeated exposure to cocaine. In 2007, then at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Zangen published the first study showing that brain stimulation in rats can reduce drug-seeking behavior, and began to develop applications of these animal studies to humans.

The MIT Technology Review reported that Zangen and his team were evaluating the potential for disrupting areas of the brain that are overactive in cases of addiction or Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

In 2018, the FDA granted de novo clearance to deep transcranial magnetic stimulation as a non-invasive treatment for OCD, after being cleared for treatment-resistant major depressive disorder in 2013 following multicenter studies conducted by Zangen and his team.

In 2020, the FDA granted clearance for a different version of this technology for smoking cessation in the wake of another multicenter study.

As of April 2021, over 100,000 patients around the world have been treated with Deep TMS.

In 2023, a comparative study led by Zangen validated the efficacy of two different Deep TMS coils for treatment-resistant depression. The study also indicated clinical and electrophysiological features that can be used to  select the best coil for a given patient. According to Zangen, this study was an "important scientific step forward towards personalized psychiatry." Zangen has been working with BrainsWay on a multichannel stimulation device that can target multiple regions of the brain in different ways, exciting some regions and suppressing others.

Zangen has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, reviews and book chapters.

Awards and recognition
Zangen has won prizes for his scientific achievements, among them the Medical Futures Innovation Award in the field of Mental Health and Neuroscience, UK, in 2007, the Sieratzki Prize for Advances in Neuroscience in 2010, the Juludan Research Prize in 2015 and the annual Innovation Award of Ben Gurion University in 2019.