At the end of 2006 I began my collaboration with Cure2Children. We had to develop the IT infrastructure, with the following requirements:

• Geographically dislocated teams: C2C operates in several countries, for example Italy, Pakistan and Kosovo
• The C2C Italian team is itself "dislocated": some users based in Florence, others in Milan, so a shared collaborative space is required
• Use of open source software: we want to share the solutions that we could develop for our projects
• User friendly environment: no power user in the organisation
• Low cost

After almost two years of preparation, on the 27th of August 2008 the first child (Aslam, 3 years old) has been hospitalized in the National Institute for Blood Diseases in Karachi (http://www.nibd.edu.pk). He will be treated for thalassemia and undergo a bone marrow transplantation under the direction of  Drs. Tahir Shamsi and Saqib Ansari.

Things are moving, after meeting with the administration and going over several issues relating to personnel, finances, and structural issues we signed an agreement which also had the approval of the Pakistani Government health authorities. We are particularly satisfied because PIMS would be the first civil government hospital in Pakistan offering BMT. Dr. Abdul Majid Rajput, Executive Director PIMS and his staff are very committed and we are aiming at starting with the first transplant by November.