Lara’s view
High-end clinics in the UAE have long attracted locals and tourists to a wide range of cosmetic treatments that shed the years superficially. But for those seeking therapies that are more than skin-deep, the nation has also become a destination for patients from India, Pakistan, neighboring Gulf countries, and beyond who are looking to live longer, better lives.
The UAE’s appeal is obvious: After years of investment and strategic planning, the country has built arguably the world’s most luxurious single-payer health care system. Its promise, embedded in the national social contract, is that oil wealth should deliver the best medicine for its citizens — and a premium experience for anyone else willing to pay.
Institutions like Imperial College London and Cleveland Clinic were invited over the past two decades to set up in the UAE, bringing advanced forms of robotic surgery and AI-assisted oncology to the region for the first time. Now the ecosystem has moved to treatments that fuse AI, genomics, and precision medicine to improve longevity.
The building blocks are coming more from personalized medicine tools, advanced diagnostics, and AI. One of the UAE’s flagship initiatives, the Emirati Genome Program — which collected samples from more than 500,000 citizens in what is becoming the world’s largest DNA database — promises to turbocharge these treatments for citizens. Using that trove, the UAE is training AI to identify and prevent diseases common in the population long before they appear.
Advanced therapeutics like stem cell treatments can flourish here, unrestricted by regulations pushed by anti-abortion activists in the US. A comfort with data gathering, alongside massive investment in AI capabilities, has the potential to provide opportunities for nationals, expats, and medical tourists to manage their care in novel ways.
“This is pointing to the most sophisticated way we can understand human health,” Dr. Nicole Sirotin, a physician formerly affiliated with Weill Cornell and now with Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, told me. She also leads the Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi, an institution driving longevity medicine in the UAE.
Longevity medicine itself is a somewhat unfocused term. Sirotin and her team helped write the guidelines defining the field for Abu Dhabi’s Department of Health. For now, it is a combination of personalized healthy living and proactive, tech-optimized disease prevention. In the years ahead, as more treatments and solutions emerge, they will have the greatest impact for patients who have decades of personal health data in the bank.
Private firms are increasingly stepping into the space. Skai Health, a new subscription-based service in Dubai, is fusing concierge primary care with high-tech diagnostics and lifestyle-enhancing therapeutics. The company’s founder, Todd McAllister, sees a “a special economic demographic” in the UAE: affluent, lifestyle-oriented, and open to experimentation. Local regulations that are data-driven and friendly to stem cell treatments set up a different level of service than he could offer in the West.
The UAE has become a public health R&D lab, and citizens across the Gulf may end up being the biggest beneficiaries, given their genetic relation to cousins and counterparts in the Emirates. More broadly, the specialized, tech-assisted clinics opening in Abu Dhabi that optimize fertility and manage menopause can generate interventions that apply to half the world’s population.
The effort is going global. One private clinic in Dubai has rolled out AI-assisted diabetes and obesity treatments, given the high burden of both in the Gulf, and is now taking the model outbound, scaling to new clinics in the UK and US.
After decades of importing longevity healthcare, the UAE is now in position to export it.
Lara Setrakian is an award-winning UAE-based journalist and media entrepreneur.
Notable
- David Rubenstein explores the science of living longer in a Bloomberg series that examines obesity, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer.