Following a series of recent healthcare industry collaborations, the UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) – the world’s first graduate research university focused only on AI – is shining a light on its unique mission to undertake significant research that seeks personalized solutions aimed at advancing society.
In March, MBZUAI and IBT joined forces in a five-year R&D agreement that will see the two parties form a joint research lab to develop personalized digital therapeutics for human brain health by
optimizing the power of AI technologies. The collaboration looks to capitalize on IBT’s capacity in developing and commercializing digital therapeutics alongside MBZUAI expertise in AI, with the ultimate goal of realizing powerful, personalized brain and mental disorder treatments.
BioMap
Also in March, announced a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with BioMap, a disruptive super-scale AI life science platform, to establish a bio- computing research laboratory that will be a first-of-its-kind in the Middle East.
Under the terms of the MoU, the two parties have agreed to focus on creating breakthroughs in AI-generated proteins (AIGP) in line with the demands of the Middle East’s most pressing needs in medical health, drug design, and other critical areas. Harnessing their joint capabilities, both MBZUAI and BioMap aim to explore new technologies to advance protein generation, protein structure prediction, cell function prediction, and other foundational life science challenges.
One such challenge is ageing-associated diseases. MBZUAI and BioMap have agreed to collaborate using large-scale AI models for multi-omics pre-training to accelerate the discovery of drug targets for ageing-associated diseases, enabling the development of personalized treatments.
Quris-AI
In January this year, MBZUAI reached an agreement with Quris-AI to develop a world-class bio-AI center in Abu Dhabi, a state-of-the-art facility to support the faster development of safer and more highly personalized medications tailored specifically to diverse populations of the Middle East and North Africa region.
Quris-AI, the world’s first bio-AI clinical prediction platform, ensures the safety and efficacy of new drugs by revolutionizing the drug development process, pioneering clinical trials on chips – testing thousands of novel drug candidates on hundreds of miniaturized “patients-on-a-chip”.
Currently, around 90 percent of clinical trials for new medications end in failure, say Quris-AI executives, but their proprietary “patients-on-a-chip” technology promises to reduce loss by predicting which drugs are most likely to work in humans. The Quris-AI system rapidly performs test interactions using predictive AI technologies that simulate genetically diverse patients, eliminating the need for animal testing and avoiding the risk and cost associated with failed clinical trials.
