# The UAE’s Big Bet on Genomic Medicine with Mohamed Alameri and Albarah El-Khani

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/mendelspod-podcast-742570/the-uae-s-big-bet-on-genomic-medicine-with-mohamed-alameri-and-albarah-el-khani
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/mendelspod-podcast-742570/the-uae-s-big-bet-on-genomic-medicine-with-mohamed-alameri-and-albarah-el-khani.md
Podcast: [Mendelspod Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/mendelspod-podcast-742570)
Published: 2026-06-23T15:46:25+00:00
Episode link: https://www.mendelspod.com/p/the-uaes-big-bet-on-genomic-medicine
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/199663486/22dbd383808553ef9884fc76c209a701.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/mendelspod-podcast-742570/episodes/the-uae-s-big-bet-on-genomic-medicine-with-mohamed-alameri-and-albarah-el-khani
Duration seconds: 2786

## Resource

The future of genomics has arrived in Abu Dhabi. On today’s show, Dr. Mohamed Alameri of the UAE Department of Health and Albarah El-Khani of M42 describe one of the most ambitious precision medicine efforts underway anywhere in the world: the Emirati Genome Program, which has already sequenced more than 900,000 genomes and is rapidly integrating that data into everyday healthcare. The UAE program is not only a large sequencing effort and database—soon to be made available for research anywhere—but a coordinated national strategy built on prevention, diagnosis, and long-term population health. Particularly striking is the UAE’s focus on inherited and autosomal recessive diseases, which occur at significantly higher prevalence in the region than in many Western populations. Rather than treating genomics as an isolated research exercise, the program has pushed aggressively into premarital screening, newborn genomic screening, pharmacogenomics, hereditary cancer risk assessment, and rare disease diagnosis. “We truly believe in the philosophy of ‘sequence once, analyze for life,’” says El-Khani. “Imagine a society where every individual from birth holds a whole genome sequence throughout their life. How powerful is that tool at every intersection of public health, clinical care, and screening?” The scale of the project is already yielding discoveries difficult to achieve elsewhere. According to Alameri, roughly 12% of the variants identified in the Emirati population are not represented in existing global databases, underscoring just how underrepresented Middle Eastern populations remain in genomics research. In some cases, variants previously considered pathogenic in European populations appear to behave differently in Emirati patients, opening entirely new biological que…

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