NEW YORK – AstraZeneca has partnered with health technology company M42 to advance preventive healthcare and precision medicine in the Middle East.
Under the agreement, Abu Dhabi-based M42 will help determine patients' genetic risk for breast cancer and tailor personalized care and preventive measures aimed at helping patients before cancer develops. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Sequencing of hereditary breast cancer-associated genes will be conducted at M42's Omics Centre of Excellence, focusing on patients from the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar. In this way, the study aims to expand the representation of non-Western populations in clinical genomics research.
The Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi will be the first hospital to collect patient genomic data through this agreement.
"This collaboration with M42 represents a significant step forward in our commitment to advancing personalized precision medicine in cancer research," Peter Raouf, Gulf Cooperation Council oncology business unit director for AstraZeneca, said in a statement.
Fahed Al Marzooqi, deputy group chief operating officer at M42, added in a statement that the "program … aims to enable personalized cancer treatment and intervention, contributing directly to patient outcomes and paving the way for preventive medicine, in keeping with our mission to support people, not just patients and prevention, not just cure."
Separately, AstraZeneca entered into a precision medicine partnership with Karolinska University Hospital and the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden to improve patient access to individually designed prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up approaches.