Translational Medicine
The Mission: Turning Scientific Knowledge into Practical Medical Tools
A scientific discovery can offer a new way to understand a disease, diagnose it, or treat it. But before it can benefit patients, researchers must determine whether it can be measured, develop it into a reliable method, and adapt it to real-world clinical needs.
What Is Translational Medicine?
Translational medicine is a field that bridges scientific research and clinical practice. This connection works in both directions: discoveries made in the laboratory can advance toward new approaches for diagnosis, treatment, or monitoring, while observations made by physicians in their patients can generate new questions that drive further research.
This is the essence of translational medicine: a continuous exchange between scientific discovery and the needs of real-world medicine. To transform scientific knowledge into a medical tool or method, it must be evaluated step by step: first by understanding the underlying mechanism, then confirming that it can be measured reliably, testing it in appropriate models, and ultimately assessing its safety, effectiveness, and clinical applicability.
Translational Medicine and Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine seeks to tailor diagnosis and treatment to the individual patient. To do so, it is necessary to identify the features that characterize the disease in that specific person, and determine which aspects of that information may influence treatment decisions or clinical monitoring.
Translational medicine examines whether such characteristics can be transformed into practical medical tools. For example, it investigates whether a particular genetic change can become the basis of a test that helps guide treatment selection, whether a specific immune response can indicate that a treatment is working, or whether a pattern identified in data can support the early detection of disease. In this way, information that initially appears to be a research finding can acquire practical value in diagnosis, clinical monitoring, or treatment.
What Are We Studying at the Dangoor Center at Bar-Ilan University?
At the Dangoor Center for Personalized Medicine at Bar-Ilan University, researchers conduct translational research—studies that begin with understanding a biological mechanism and are directed toward developing new methods for diagnosis, treatment, or clinical monitoring.
One of the Center's leading research directions is gene editing and the development of therapeutic approaches. Prof. Eyal Hendel studies the use of CRISPR technologies to correct genetic defects. In research on bubble boy disease, a genetic correction strategy has been developed for this severe inherited disease through a collaboration between researchers and physicians. A complementary direction of research in his laboratory is CRISPECTOR—a computational tool designed to evaluate the efficiency and safety of gene editing.
Another research direction focuses on cancer immunotherapy. Prof. Mira Barda-Saad studies how the activity of the immune system against cancer cells can be strengthened. Her research focuses, among other things, on natural killer cells and the mechanisms that allow tumors to suppress the immune response, with the goal of identifying more targeted ways to address the clinical challenge of immune suppression.
The Center also investigates the use of genetic information and computational tools for more precise disease characterization. Dr. Binyamin Knisbacher uses machine learning and genetic sequence analysis to better understand blood cancers and to develop practical tools that can help physicians with early diagnosis and the identification of disease subtypes.
Another translational research direction focuses on RNA editing. Prof. Erez Y. Levanon, Prof. Shay Ben-Aroya, and Prof. Dror Sharon are investigating ways to correct mutations at the RNA level without altering the DNA itself. In research on severe inherited eye diseases, they are exploring the use of the ADAR enzyme as the basis for a new therapeutic approach.
Translational Research and Multidisciplinary Collaboration
Translational research advances when researchers, physicians, data scientists, and technology developers work on the same problem from different perspectives. The laboratory provides an understanding of the biological mechanism, the clinic defines the medical need, and measurement and analytical tools help determine whether that knowledge can be transformed into a reliable and practical method. At the Dangoor Center, this integration takes place through collaborations among researchers in biology, genetics, immunology, data science, and medicine, alongside partnerships with clinical institutions and the biotechnology industry.
The Center's research illustrates several different pathways in translational medicine, including genetic correction, the oversight of gene editing, immunotherapy, artificial intelligence for disease characterization, and RNA editing. Together, these research directions demonstrate how scientific knowledge can advance toward more precise methods of diagnosis, clinical monitoring, and treatment.
