AREAS OF INTEREST
- pediatric respiratory diseases
- cystic fibrosis
- chronic lung diseases
- asthma
- complicated pneumonia
- Prof. Eitan Kerem was born in Jerusalem and graduated from the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in 1982. He completed his pediatric residency at the” Bikur Holim” Hospital in Jerusalem. In 1987 he joined the Chest Division of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, for a three-year fellowship in pediatric respiratory diseases. Upon his return to Israel, he worked as a senior physician at the Department of Pediatrics, Pulmonary and Cystic Fibrosis Clinic of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem, and was appointed Director of its Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine Unit in 1996.
- In 2002 he was appointed Head of the Department of Pediatrics at the Hadassah Medical Center, Mount Scopus, and Professor in Pediatrics at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School.
- In 2005 he founded the Center for Chronic Diseases in Children located in the outpatient building of the Hadassah Medical Center Mount Scopus, a unique clinic which integrates all the services needed for the treatment of chronically ill children.
- Prof. Kerem is a world known leader in Cystic Fibrosis research, principal investigator of many national and international multi-center clinical trials and author of key publications in the field. His interest in Cystic Fibrosis spans all aspects, i.e., the association between phenotype and genotype, prognostic factors for disease severity and prediction of mortality, the molecular mechanisms for disease variability, and development of new mutation-specific pharmacological therapies to correct the basic defects in cystic fibrosis.
- Additional aspects of his research include asthma (environmental interaction with genetic diseases and its influence on the disease severity, genetic markers of asthma and allergy in closed populations, and variability of disease in closed populations exposed to different environments) and community acquired pneumonia (necrotizing pneumonia and risk factors for complicated pneumonia).
- The promotion of the medical, ethical and rights aspects of children with chronic diseases is at the forefront of his interest.
- Prof. Kerem was a board member of the European Cystic Fibrosis Society http://www.ecfs.eu. His major activity was to develop the European CF Registry. The purpose of the European CF Registry is to measure, survey and compare aspects of cystic fibrosis and its treatment, thereby encouraging new standards of dealing with the disease, to provide data for epidemiological research and to identify special patient groups suitable for multi-centre trials.
- Prof. Kerem is the president of CIPP the International Congress on Pediatric Pulmonology http://www.cipp-meeting.com. He was also a member of the editorial boards of “Pediatric Pulmonology”, “Chest” and “American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine”, the leading journals in the field of Pulmonology.