Bringing life-saving cancer therapy closer to patients
Bar-Ilan partners in €8M European effort to deliver same-day CAR-T treatment in hospitals
A faster path from diagnosis to treatment
Bar-Ilan University has joined EASYGEN, a five-year, €8 million European initiative funded by the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI), to transform how hospitals deliver personalized immunotherapies such as CAR-T. The project’s goal is an end-to-end, automated platform that lets hospitals manufacture CAR-T cells on-site in about 24 hours—dramatically shorter than the current weeks-long, centralized process.
Why point-of-care CAR-T matters
CAR-T therapy reprograms a patient’s own immune cells to target cancer. Today, production is slow, expensive, and limited to a small number of specialized facilities, which restricts access for many patients. EASYGEN aims to decentralize manufacturing, reduce costs, and relieve clinical bottlenecks so more hospitals, including non-academic centers, can offer these life-saving treatments.
BIU expertise: making CRISPR edits safer and more precise
A key partner in EASYGEN is the lab of Prof. Ayal Hendel at Bar-Ilan University’s Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences. The Hendel Lab will lead evaluations of genome-editing precision for CAR-T manufacturing, using advanced methods to detect and quantify off-target effects and other safety signals in CRISPR-edited cells.
“Our goal is to make sure the powerful gene editing tools used in this therapy are as accurate as possible,” said Prof. Hendel. “By improving the safety profile, we’re helping pave the way for hospitals around the world to offer these treatments directly and confidently to patients.”
A Europe-wide collaboration led by Fresenius
Coordinated by Fresenius SE & Co. KGaA, EASYGEN brings together 18 partners across eight countries, including leading hospitals, research institutes, and biotech companies. Academic partners include the Fraunhofer Institute in Leipzig, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Navarra.
“EASYGEN unites physicians, researchers, and partner institutions across Europe to collaboratively deliver innovative, personalized therapies more swiftly to where they matter most—to patients in need,” said Dr. Sonja Steppan, Head of Research Office at Fresenius SE and Principal Investigator for EASYGEN. “Automating patient-specific therapies such as CAR-T is essential to make these treatments more broadly accessible, especially in non-academic clinical environments.”