The inherent benefits of AI’s application to healthcare are often described using words such as speed, consistency, and cost, but there is another crucial descriptor that is often overlooked: personalisation.

While experts often use statistics to illustrate the enormity of disease burdens on populations, AI is poised to tackle complex healthcare challenges through disruptive technologies that can provide fast, consistent, and cost-effective problem-solving solutions for drug developers and healthcare professionals alike.

AI will not be an immediate cure-all for the world’s health problems, but it has the potential to help us make sense of previously intractable life science issues in a matter of months, years, or even decades.

Thanks to a series of recent partnerships and collaborations in the healthcare industry, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in the UAE – the world’s first graduate research university focused solely on AI – is taking a public stance on its mission to conduct significant research aimed at advancing society through personalized solutions.

In March, MBZUAI and IBT announced a five-year R&D partnership that will establish a joint research laboratory dedicated to developing personalized digital therapeutics for brain health by leveraging the power of AI technologies.

This collaboration will combine IBT’s expertise in developing and commercializing digital therapeutics with MBZUAI’s AI expertise to create powerful, personalized treatments for brain and mental disorders. This personalized approach to mental health treatment is particularly significant, given that the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that more than one billion people – or one in eight individuals worldwide – suffer from some form of mental illness, from depression and anxiety to schizophrenia, according to the WHO’s World Mental Health Report.

In March of this year, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) announced a partnership with BioMap, a life science platform powered by super-scale AI models, to establish a biocomputing innovation research laboratory in the Middle East, focusing on breakthroughs in AI-generated proteins (AIGP) to address medical health, drug design, and other foundational life science challenges. By using large-scale AI models for multi-omics pre-training, MBZUAI and BioMap aim to accelerate the discovery of drug targets for aging-associated diseases and develop personalised treatments.

In addition, MBZUAI has recently joined forces with Quris-AI to create a bio-AI centre in Abu Dhabi that will support the development of safer and more personalised medications tailored to the diverse populations of the Middle East and North Africa region. Quris-AI’s pioneering clinical trials on chips technology uses predictive AI models to simulate genetically diverse patients, avoiding the risk and cost associated with failed clinical trials. By collaborating with innovative companies and minds in the field of AI research and innovation, MBZUAI is helping to create tomorrow’s personalised global healthcare solutions today, providing an education for all future leaders in this field.