The UAE Just Started a 25-Year Experiment That Could Change How We Detect Disease

The UAE is embarking on an ambitious 25-year research project that aims to understand how diseases develop long before symptoms become visible.

The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has launched the Human Phenotype Project, a long-term population study in Abu Dhabi designed to investigate how genetics, biology, lifestyle and environmental factors interact to influence health and disease.

Over the course of the study, researchers will track participants using a broad combination of health and biological measurements, including medical history, lifestyle information, advanced medical imaging, blood tests, continuous glucose monitoring, sleep monitoring and multi-omics data. The latter includes genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and metagenomics, allowing researchers to examine different biological processes at multiple levels.

The goal is to build a detailed picture of how health changes over time and identify patterns that could help researchers detect disease risk much earlier — potentially years before conventional symptoms appear.

What makes the project particularly interesting is the population it will study. The UAE is home to residents from more than 200 nationalities, creating an unusually diverse population for a long-term health cohort. MBZUAI sees this demographic diversity as a major scientific advantage, particularly for understanding how genetic and environmental differences may influence disease development.

Large population health studies already exist elsewhere, including the UK Biobank, but many of these projects draw primarily from more geographically and demographically homogeneous populations. The UAE's diverse population could therefore provide researchers with data covering a broader range of genetic backgrounds and lifestyles.

Participation in the Human Phenotype Project is open to UAE citizens and residents between the ages of 18 and 70. Participation is free and voluntary, and participants can withdraw from the study at any time.

Those who take part will also have access to personalised research insights through a secure individual study portal. Participants can choose to share these insights with their own physicians, creating a potential benefit for individuals while the broader dataset is used for research.

The project also places a strong emphasis on data protection. Biological samples will be stored at a secure healthcare facility in the UAE, while personally identifying information will be separated from research data before scientific analysis takes place.

The study has received approval from the Department of Health Abu Dhabi's Health Research and Technology Committee, MBZUAI's Institutional Review Board and the IHLAD Research Ethics Committee. According to the university, the project also follows UAE federal and Abu Dhabi privacy regulations.

Dr Fatima Al Kaabi, Director General of the Emirates Drug Establishment and an affiliated associate professor of personalised medicine at MBZUAI, said the project builds on the UAE's previous investment in population genomics through the Emirati Genome Programme.

By combining clinical, biological and lifestyle information collected over an extended period with artificial intelligence, researchers hope to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how diseases emerge and progress.

The long-term ambition extends beyond simply collecting data. The researchers aim to use the information to support more precise approaches to disease prevention and personalised medicine, while potentially generating insights relevant to pharmaceutical research and the development of new therapeutic strategies.

The Human Phenotype Project is part of a wider expansion of health and life-sciences research at MBZUAI. Its Division of Biological and Life Sciences is currently involved in more than 20 ongoing or planned projects with partners including the Weizmann Institute, Crown Prince Court, BioMap, Aspire, Abu Dhabi Health Services Company and Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City.

Other projects include MAGNET-AD, an AI-based system designed to identify Alzheimer's disease risk potentially years before symptoms emerge, and BiMediX, an Arabic-English medical language model developed for healthcare applications.

With the Human Phenotype Project set to follow participants for a quarter of a century, the UAE is creating one of its most ambitious long-term datasets at the intersection of AI, genomics, preventive healthcare and precision medicine.

The real value of the project, however, will emerge over time: as years of biological and lifestyle data accumulate, researchers may gain a clearer picture of not only who develops disease, but why, when and how it begins.