MBZUAI has launched a 25-year study to predict disease years before it shows symptoms: Free and voluntary for residents

Dubai: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has launched a long-term study in Abu Dhabi designed to map the genetic, biological and lifestyle factors behind disease in the UAE population, with the aim of catching illness years before it becomes symptomatic.

The Human Phenotype Project will run for 25 years, tracking each participant across an unusually wide range of measurements: medical history, lifestyle, advanced imaging, blood tests, continuous glucose and sleep monitoring, and multi-omics data covering genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and metagenomics.

What makes the data different

The value of the study rests less on its methodology, which has precedent, than on where it is being run.

The UAE's population draws from more than 200 nationalities, and MBZUAI is presenting that diversity as the project's scientific edge. Most existing large-scale health cohorts, the UK Biobank among them, are built on largely homogeneous national populations. A dataset this mixed is harder to assemble and, the university argues, harder for any other country to replicate.

How it works

Participation is open to UAE citizens and residents aged 18 to 70. It is free and voluntary, and anyone can withdraw at any point.

Each participant receives personalised research insights through a secure individual study portal, which they can choose to share with their own physician. That is a direct benefit to participants rather than something withheld until the research concludes.

Biological samples are stored at a secure UAE-based healthcare facility, and personal identifying information is separated from research data before any scientific analysis takes place.

The study has approval from the Department of Health Abu Dhabi's Health Research and Technology Committee, MBZUAI's own Institutional Review Board, and the IHLAD Research Ethics Committee, and the university says it complies with both UAE federal and Abu Dhabi local privacy law.

Dr Fatima Al Kaabi, Director General of the Emirates Drug Establishment and an affiliated associate professor of personalised medicine at MBZUAI, linked the study to the UAE's earlier work in the field.

"The UAE has cemented its leadership in population genomics through the Emirati Genome Programme," she said. "This study marks an important step forward in building an integrated health knowledge base that brings together clinical, biological and lifestyle data collected over an extended period, while harnessing artificial intelligence to transform these datasets into scientific insights that deepen our understanding of how diseases emerge and progress."

She framed the strategic case around fit rather than scale. "The strategic value of this study lies in its ability to generate scientific evidence that is more closely aligned with the health characteristics and demographic diversity of the UAE population," she said, adding that it should support more precise preventive models and open new ground in precision medicine, preventive healthcare and pharmaceutical sciences.

Where it fits at MBZUAI

The study sits inside the university's Institute of Digital Public Health, which lists more than 20 ongoing or upcoming health research projects run with partners including the Weizmann Institute, the Crown Prince Court, BioMap, Aspire, Abu Dhabi Health Services Company and Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City.

Other work coming out of the same institute includes MAGNET-AD, an AI system reported to predict Alzheimer's onset up to two decades before symptoms appear, and BiMediX, an Arabic-English medical language model that has been downloaded more than 140,000 times.

Sami Haddadin, MBZUAI's Vice President of Research, described the broader ambition in an earlier statement: an AI-powered health system built for the UAE's population that can still generalise worldwide, learning from local genetic and lifestyle patterns to predict, personalise and prevent disease.

About MBZUAI

Founded in 2019, MBZUAI enrolled its first graduate students in 2021 and opened a selective undergraduate programme in 2025. It now has close to a thousand students from more than 70 countries.

More information on the study is available at hpp.mbzuai.ac.ae.