The UAE’s Big Bet on Genomic Medicine with Mohamed Alameri and Albarah El-Khani
About this episode
The episode discusses the Emirati Genome Program and its impact on genomic medicine in the UAE.
The future of genomics has arrived in Abu Dhabi. On today’s show, Dr. Mohamed Alameri of the UAE Department of Health and Albarah El-Khani of M42 describe one of the most ambitious precision medicine efforts underway anywhere in the world: the Emirati Genome Program, which has already sequenced more than 900,000 genomes and is rapidly integrating that data into everyday healthcare. The UAE program is not only a large sequencing effort and database—soon to be made available for research anywhere—but a coordinated national strategy built on prevention, diagnosis, and long-term population health. Particularly striking is the UAE’s focus on inherited and autosomal recessive diseases, which occur at significantly higher prevalence in the region than in many Western populations. Rather than treating genomics as an isolated research exercise, the program has pushed aggressively into premarital screening, newborn genomic screening, pharmacogenomics, hereditary cancer risk assessment, and rare disease diagnosis. “We truly believe in the philosophy of ‘sequence once, analyze for life,’” says El-Khani. “Imagine a society where every individual from birth holds a whole genome sequence…
People in this episode
Host: Theral Timpson
Guests: Mohamed Alameri, Albarah El-Khani
Topics covered
- genomic medicine
- precision medicine
- healthcare
- population health
- genome sequencing
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: UAE Department of Health, M42
Places: UAE, Abu Dhabi
More episodes of Mendelspod Podcast
- Agilent and Oxford Nanopore Discuss Bringing Long Reads to the Clinic with a Customer
- Liquid Biopsy for the Tumor Microenvironment: with Vince Miller and Mirna Jarosz
- Can Liquid Biopsy Transform Chronic Disease? Hamed Amini and Soheil Damangir of Hepta
- Ryan Flynn of Harvard on Non-Coding RNA
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Mendelspod Podcast podcast page.