Actually I’m representing the Israeli Leukaemia Working Group. We joined as associate members because we see an opportunity to promote medicine with this method of big data and we’re very excited to be part of it with our data from Israel.

Are there additional challenges when combining data from Israel?

There are but I prefer to speak about opportunity, not about the challenges. For us, being part of this project is an opportunity to bring to the front populations that usually are under-represented in databases, patients that we treat in the Middle East. We can use our advantage as a country that is very well computerised and we have very rich data. Actually we see also one important benefit beyond what we can benefit from treatment of the haematological diseases per se. I see myself, I’m a leukaemia doctor but first of all I’m an internist, an internal medicine doctor, and the big data is an opportunity to find things and facts that we are not aware of, something that can benefit our patients or prior to their cancer was diagnosed, of course during their cancer treatment but even after they survive cancer. We usually miss things that maybe these methods will demonstrate as how important they are. So there are much more opportunities than challenges.

What has to be done your end?

First of all it’s our duty to bring up the data. There are challenges, we need to make everybody cooperate - big data that were collected in different institutions and in different forms - make the data accurate.

What will you hope to learn and bring to projects in Israel?

Obviously I assume that this project will bring up some new insights about how we treat our patients, but I hope to see other things. I want to see things that will help us to diagnose patients better and to treat them after they survive cancer even better.