Dr. Ayal Hendel's Lab
About
The Hendel Lab, at the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, focuses on studying and developing effective, safe, and definitive gene therapy for patients with genetic diseases using the CRISPR-Cas9 system. Particularly, we are interested in applying genome editing for hematopoietic genetic disorders such as severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) and hematologic malignancies.
Partner's Genome Editing vision
The CRISPR genome-editing technology has rapidly transformed scientific and clinical research. In order to be able to apply genome-editing in the clinic, we must assure that the technology is both efficient and safe. Our vision is to develop an optimized and standardized pipeline and analysis methodology for CRISPR genome editing that would allow robust on-target editing activity combined with the ability to control off-target activity. Such a pipeline will make the CRISPR technology more accurate and affective and will hopefully accelerate the path from bench to bedside.
Partner's activity within the consortium
As part of WG2, the Hendel Lab focuses on developing and optimizing standardized wet protocols for on- and off-target identification and quantification to eventually be utilized by the CRISPR-IL consortium. This protocol development is based on the unbiased identification of potential off-target sites and the measurement of their activity using targeted NGS approach. Based on the data collected during this research, we, together with the Yakhini group, developed and optimized a state-of-the-art pipeline that combines the wet protocol with our CRISPECTOR data-analysis tool (jointly developed with the Yakhini group; Amit et. al., Nat Commun. 2021) for the accurate identification and quantification of genome-editing outcomes.
