Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the world’s first graduate research university focused only on AI, is continuing its mission to undertake significant research that seeks to identify and deliver solutions to advance society.

On World Health Day, MBZUAI President and University Professor, Eric Xing, said: “AI has the potential to transform many aspects of healthcare, from the early detection and diagnosis of diseases, to enhanced monitoring and tracking of patients and the development of new treatments and personalised care.

“MBZUAI is dedicated to developing AI for good, and some of the best use-cases are in healthcare. I am optimistic that research being conducted by MBZUAI at our campus, and in conjunction with organisations in other locations, will – within just a few years – lead to completely new ways of understanding and treating diseases, and better ways of organising our healthcare systems regionally and internationally.”

In March, MBZUAI and Infinite Brain Technologies (IBT) joined forces in a five-year R&D agreement that will see the two parties form a joint research lab to develop personalised digital therapeutics for human brain health by optimising the power of AI technologies.

The collaboration looks to capitalise on IBT’s capacity in developing and commercialising digital therapeutics alongside MBZUAI expertise in AI, with the ultimate goal of realising powerful, personalised brain and mental disorder treatments.  Such a personalised approach to mental health treatment is quite an ambitious goal, given that the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than one in eight people in the world, roughly one billion people, suffers from some type of mental illness, from depression and anxiety to schizophrenia.

Earlier in the month of March, MBZUAI announced an agreement with BioMap, a disruptive super-scale AI model-powered life science platform, to establish a biocomputing innovation research laboratory that will be a first-of-its-kind in the Middle East.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two parties 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 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.

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 aging-associated diseases, enabling the development of personalised treatments.

In January 2023, MBZUAI reached an agreement with Quris-AI to develop a world-class bio-AI centre in Abu Dhabi, a state-of-the-art facility to support the faster development of safer and more highly personalised 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 revolutionising the drug development process, pioneering clinical trials on chips , testing thousands of novel drug candidates on hundreds of miniaturised patients-on-a-chip.