Voice of the Jewish News: UK and Israel’s healthy relations

 Only a few years ago, if you wanted to see what health secrets your genetics hid, you’d have to spend millions of pounds and use a network of labs to sequence your genome.

Now the same exercise costs as much as a second-hand bike, takes a fraction of the time and can be done using gadgets you hold in your hand. Such is the sometimes scary pace of change in the healthcare industry, one of the world’s largest markets.

The future will be almost unrecognisable. Consider the microbiome, that bacterial ecosystem living in your gut. What they’re finding out about it now will soon revolutionise what we eat and how we feel.

Likewise, knowing our genes will put an end to trial-and-error drugs, because we’ll know what works and what doesn’t based on our DNA. And with the advance of computing power, our problems will soon be diagnosed by intelligent ‘bots, with scans and imaging analysed earlier, quicker, more accurately and cheaper by algorithms. In short, healthcare as we know it will be turned on its head.

• READ MORE: Philanthropist David Dangoor: We’ll pipe Israeli health tech directly into the NHS

Old-school gent and British Jewish philanthropist David Dangoor knows what’s coming and has planned for the UK and Israel to head into this bio-health revolution together, launching this week an initiative that will pair the two countries in
this field.

Scientists in both countries are among the world’s best, and already work together in many fields. This initiative breaks new ground in pairing the NHS with Israeli start-ups to help nudge us along that revolutionary road.

The motivation couldn’t be stronger. The NHS is sadly on its knees, forever ‘in crisis’ and is, it could be argued, desperately in need of a fundamental redesign because it was conceived in another era just after the war, a bygone age if you consider the pace of change in healthcare.

Mr Dangoor is helping in a small way, as are Israelis, whose ingenuity and habit of asking questions will help humanity’s health for years to come. Watch this space…