SAMIHAH ZAMAN (ABU DHABI)
Abu Dhabi is positioning itself at the forefront of personalised medicine, with large-scale biological datasets and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities opening new possibilities for the future of health. This push to redefine healthcare is now attracting top talent from across the globe keen to join the transformation.
Professor Cédric Notredame is among the leading minds in Abu Dhabi. Developer of Nextflow, a groundbreaking open-source scientific language, he is now Professor of Computational Biology at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).
At the research-focused university, Dr Notredame is working alongside other pioneers to usher in an era in which preventive health and personalised medicine are the norm.
“Medicine is about to change dramatically because we are shifting from general medicine, where you are treated against the average of the population, to a situation in which a decision on how you will be treated will increasingly depend on your own data that has been accumulated over decades,” Prof Notredame told Aletihad in an exclusive interview.
Abu Dhabi Takes the Lead
“The reason I have come here is [because] MBZUAI is taking a lead in this direction, with the incorporation of Eran Segal, a world leader in this field who is [spearheading] the human phenotype project (HPP),” he added.
The HPP combines advanced data collection and artificial intelligence methods to discover observable personal characteristics – an individual’s phenotype – and help predict future medical conditions even before they present symptomatically.
It aims to monitor Emiratis and UAE residents for 25 years in order to determine the correlation between exposure to risk factors and disease onset.
Next-gen Computation
Nextflow, which Prof Notredame developed, is being used to support the project, and scale up its outcomes.
“Nextflow [is like] plumbing for data, moving it from where it is generated all the way to where it is going to be processed, such as the AI. During this transportation, [the data is optimised] so that you can get the best out of it,” he explained.
Nextflow can run thousands of analyses reproducibly across any local or cloud environment, and is already being used by global pharma giant Moderna to assist in the development of personalised vaccines against cancer.
At MBZUAI, the aim is to expand the HPP deep-phenotyping effort and its outcomes using Nextflow. “MBZUAI is providing extraordinary opportunities to scale up at a level that could not even be contemplated three or four years ago,” Dr Notredame said.
Genomic Research
Abu Dhabi is also forging ahead with the Emirati Genome project, a national effort to draw a comprehensive genetic map for UAE citizens. The programme is known to be one of the largest population genome collection initiatives in the world.
“The Emirati Genome project has generated the largest nationwide collection of genomes. This data is extremely valuable for a variety of reasons. One of them is that the Emirati population has a very specific genetic structure, which will bring a lot of innovation when exploiting the genome [for preventive and personalised medicine],” Dr Notredame said.
Data Convergence to Advance Science
When combined, the results of the HPP and the Emirati Genome project are expected to help answer pressing questions in medicine about how a person’s genes and other physical traits interact to affect overall health.
“We will have convergence of genomic data - how we are coded – [from the Emirati Genome project] and the phenotypic data – how we look. The tension between genotype and phenotype is a very important scientific question, and it is one that can only be solved with more data, and the data is being acquired here,” Dr Notredame said.