Untapping the Potential of a Critical Sector: Health, Tech, Wellness and Beyond

good morning everyone thank you for joining us here today on this very exciting panel uh we will be looking at a very interesting topic on untapping the critical sector of Health wellness and we are joined on stage by these Trailblazers innovators and entrepreneurs that will tell us about these Technologies and how they're navigating the landscape today um from everything from AI Innovation to um regulation so before we start I'd like the panelists to please introduce themselves and then we can uh jump right into the topic in panel hey good morning can you guys hear me okay perfect uh my name is Kaa I'm the CEO of BIOS sapian uh essentially a physician by training uh but have done several things in the past including being on the other side as a venture capitalist uh started about six companies in the past not as exciting as that sounds uh some wins some losses happy to talk about it another time and thanks for having me here hello everyone my name is LP Noel um I'm a technology entrepreneur biotwin is my fort uh technology Fort business sorry and uh I funded biotwin which is a human virtual company uh which uh helps do precision and personalize medicine it's a pleasure to be here today hi I'm laurena I'm the founder of sid. Life AI an investment banker gone save the world as cheesy as that sounds I've done about five degrees in math and finance and then due to a personal health uh challenge I decided that my skill set is better put to helping people live higher quality lives and hopefully 1 billion of them so what we've done is basically taken all the knowledge that exists in preventive Health about 1.2 million research papers we've built that into one AI engine and we're making that accessible affordable sustainable for millions of people today in 26 countries excellent hi Nina Tandon CEO and co-founder of EB bone um I've been work EB bone is a 10-year-old company so I'm I'm not a Serial entrepreneur um at least not yet um however uh electrical engineer turned bioengineer by training later got an MBA after working as a Management Consultant where I think like Kia also saw that other side and um you know what we do at epibone is we combine several deep Tech modalities like 3D fabrication Robotics and stem cell science to do something really natural which is to make bone and cartilage that's just like the bone and cartilage in our bodies but grown from cells in a lab and we do that because and we can get into it skeletal diseases are the number one cause of disability worldwide thanks a thank you soina we'll actually start with you um you work in the biotechnology and um extremely Innovative um in terms of the the vision that you have for epib bone and the problem that you're solving how do you balance that with uh the regulatory uh hurdles and I'd actually like to ask uh LP and um Kadija after on that as well yeah thank you for that question um so I'm a New Yorker um I'm an American by citizenship um have Global parentage um and so I think when um and and and I mentioned that epibone is not new uh we're 10 years old and I've been working on the technology for 10 years prior so I've been doing this work for 20 years and um and I'd promised my sister and I'd promised my husband and a whole host of other people that by the time they needed cartilage we would have it for them and I knew that I couldn't keep this promise uh if we stayed in the US Alone um so we did the the US for example has uh you know great things like the FDA and when you get FDA approval it's highly exportable um however um we couldn't escape things it like the macro conditions of high interest rates and high inflation and and there were companies dropping right and left in What's called the biotech winter um trading below Enterprise Val you know negative Enterprise Value so we did a worldwide search to say is there a place in the world any place in the world because I'm an American but I'm also an Earthling um where maybe some of these macro forces are different and the search brought us to places like not surprisingly like Singapore here um Taipei and elsewhere and what makes um Abu Dhabi really unique is the exact you know question I promise it wasn't a plant um you know I think that make this this ecosystem really unique the commercial and Regulatory opportunity that's available here um and I don't it's it's just so unique BEC and I'll say commercial um because it's a growing ecosystem what we do with skeletal diseases is in the National interest we can reach 80% of the world's population with within an 8 hour flight which matters if you're making perishable products that are alive or making you know living bone rep living joint replacements for example so that's really important so from a commercial perspective it's really well located but the regulatory piece can't be understated there's top tier medical institutions here which is you know essential for what we do um but the futuristic regulations that are being written for the moment um and in the US unfortunately they've been written for really the first wave of of therapies which was about 30 years ago um that mix of the logistical Crossroads um the top tier medical institutions you know we can just look right out the window and the forward-thinking regulatory policies will allow us to achieve a few things we couldn't do in the US things like you know nerdy things like platform designation basically just reaching patients 3 to 5 years faster than we could in the us alone and enlarging our total addressable Market um more exponentially than we could in the US so these are things that if the regulations are written um thoughtfully and borrowing best practices from and this is what the UAE does so well they they borrow what's done well elsewhere and then accelerate it and do things here first fastest best um by learning those lessons and just executing really well so we're so excited to be here um and be part of this journey of um you know this this new I think push around biotechnology here in the region amazing um khad what about from your perspective with bio sapen how have you seen the balance with biotechnology Innovation and the the regulatory framework of where we you were before and then moving to Abu Dhabi do you share the same experiences uh or perspective as as Nina yeah definitely I think I come from a different perspective because we were two cohorts prior to where Nina is so I've been been in Abu D for about a year and a half give or take um so I've actually seen the discussions change from hey what is biotech to oh my God now we want to invest in biotech and we have the desire to want to grow and and Etc um kind of voicing what Nina said I think from a regulatory standpoint if we can talk about that for a second in the US it takes about nine months to get a regulatory approval to just start a clinical trial it's seven business days in the UAE it's substantially faster it's stronger it's U more Innovative in the sense that there's an entire idea within do called sandboxing which does not exist in the US I can tell you that for sure in order for you to actually speak to someone in the regulatory space uh whether it's the FDA or the CMA or whoever it is you you basically have to schedule an appointment set in a request you know spend about a year getting response back and then they give you a date for you know 2027 quarter three in the middle of June in Washington DC right whereas in the UAE if you would like to speak to do they're on the 15th floor of alam Tower you just go knock on their door and they'll happily chat with you so I think that open door policy and the desire to innovate is something that really differentiates the UAE from other regulatory um entities that exist uh the EU I would say if I can it's like 50 years behind uh in that sense you know it takes even longer to um get an approval to to have feedback to have that collaborative sort of approach where I think the UAE is at the Forefront in the GCC uh because other countries like Saudi and Qatar and uh you know Kuwait and bahin they're all actively moving towards that but I think the key runner up is the UAE in that regard before we move to the AI space and remain in the biospace lp would you like to share your thoughts on this well my experience very similar uh but coming from Canada so Canada is a free healthcare system uh it's got a lot of uh Pro but one of the major problem with that it's the system is really slow to innovate uh it's one speed only uh when Kia was saying it's 9 month in the US that's actually you guys are lucky it's a minimum of two years in Canada and you should expect three before you start a collaborative research project with a hospital uh doing AI you cannot afford to wa two 3 years on that uh and it's the same thing regulation biotwin we create a virtual replica of you of your own biology we have it at home kit it's quite novel and the regulatory institution don't really know how to apply the rules and so they're basically just waiting which is totally different here um you can really rapidly launch a project with major institution like the Cleveland Clinic they're actually open to that you're looking for Innovation and I've got the same feedback with the Department of Health which we the reason why we're here today is we got to meet the Department of Health we told them what we were doing they were impressed they Lov it and said you know you should come to a country we love Innovation and that's that's the feedback we've had with them the project that we're launching uh they're one of the first supporter you know they and and what we also like about the system here is nobody's afraid of failure uh we'll be announcing a project with the Cleveland Clinic shortly and one of the thing they told us is say you know let's start this and if it doesn't work at first let's reiterate and let let's make it work so they really have the right mindset which in in Canada we really do not have we have to fight the system instead of having this supporting us uh we need to fight with them all the time so it's really great to be here and be surrounded and have everyone working alongside to the benefit of us entrepreneur but also ultimately the patient will benefit from that Thank You LP um I think we'll pivot to a different angle uh epibone biot and bio saion are all in the hard tech deep Tech space and obviously require um regul regulation to The Innovation I'll move to Sid AI Lura and I'd love to hear more about um how AI has helped um looking at individual and business um Wellness which you reiterated is more quality of life and how these Technologies um look a bit more macro into um a different angle of Health um and wellness super and the medical space is a really good uh background to this today in the world we have 90% of the global health care costs that are linked to preventable conditions so when people talk about about Wellness or life quality what we're actually talking about is basically $8 trillion dollar every year that goes down the drain so the opportunity is really to empower the individual to take charge of their own life quality AKA not only Health Journey but also their uh impact on the environment their career their Financial Health all of these that we have packed under Sid's roof so the opportunity here is clearly financially very attractive but if we look um specifically here at the UAE the number one cause of death is cardiovascular disease and number three is diabetes Now imagine if we empower the population with the simple AI Mentor tool that reduces that risk by just 1% currently the UA is spending 10 billion on that so reducing that by 1% you're already saving a few hundred millions from from the get-go so the power of AI in this space of prevention analytics is really to empower the individual to take charge but also organizations like for example the UAE again is cutting edge with organizations like malfi is brilliant I've traveled around the world we operate in 26 countries and I haven't seen a country that has genuinely all of the data for a patient and individual and working with that leveraging Ai and you know we've uh we've built a pipeline of over a million research papers to make sense of that data you're basically leveraging technology to do the job of interpreting data and Prov providing advice guidance and support to millions of people for cents on the dollar so I think the real power of AI is for the individual to take charge I think everyone wants to take charge but also for organizations governments and hospitals to have a much clearer picture of the return on investment for the money that get put in in prevention I'd like to follow up on that so can you walk us through through the platform and how it works um and maybe just uh quick kind of user experience for an individual and how that would look like for an organization um and the kind of outputs and outcomes that you would imagine from um seeing how AI can be looking at more like organizational or behavioral change within businesses great sure so first in simple terms um the technology is um the world's first large language model in life quality so we leverage 1.2 million research papers imagine that that goes into a big big engine the engine extracts the right knowledge the right kpis and the right connections between what do you do and what is the dollar impact and the outcome so imagine all of that done by AI if we needed people to do that we would need about 60 th000 doctors and researchers doing that nonstop for one decade so that's part one we've it took us five years to build that platform from zero and then imagine that all of that knowledge is being uh transferred on a realtime basis to um virtual companion app for individuals and I'll share a bit about that and and then a population analytics dashboard for the organization now the link between the research and the output is uh the interesting part and it's about nine different AI engines that work there in Risk prediction in recommendation engine personalization engine um and every single day at 6:00 a.m.

in the morning all of the research that was published in the last 24 hours is collected and built into the engine so every day you basically have all of the knowledge that exists today on the planet in life quality so every person that has access to Sid then has in their hands a companion that has all of the knowledge that is able to collect their personal data their Health Data their movement data location so basically all of that is building a digital twin of them to figure out what are risk areas what areas do they want to focus Fus on maybe it's physical health maybe it's Financial well-being maybe it's career maybe it's environmental impact and then they are guided to make the smallest changes for the biggest impact for the governments organizations that work with us the biggest challenge is to make sense of data the last decade the name of the game was um data is the new gold or the new oil well now the problem is we have a ton of data but what do we do with it so the engine is basically enabling us to make sense of that data to provide advice guidance insights to the individual and to the organization to see Improvement in productivity reduction in health costs Improvement on return on investment return on engagement as well as overall population life quality that's around thank you Lena I think um AI as a the emergence of AI has been seen as this new kind of Hot Topic um I think especially in the past two years everyone's talking about AI whereas it's not necessarily a vertical of its own it's a bit more horizontal because it cuts through a lot of sectors and verticals uh Nina can you walk us through um with epibone um you said the company's been around for 10 years so clearly you've seen a lot of Technologies and developments over the years and piggy backing on this um utilization of of AI to optimize a lot of your processes can you explain to us how AI has helped um transform push um the mission of epibone and then I'd like to ask the same question for thank you the bio the biot team I love this question you know I actually I my background is electrical engineering and computer science so I started out doing Enterprise communication software in the early.com era and so one of the first projects that I ever did H before even starting my work in tissue engineering was on a non-invasive lung cancer detector um project in Italy it was called the Libra nose and it worked by integrating the information from several sensors you've probably heard that dogs can smell cancer right um well how do how would we that this was a project meant to kind of copy that so there was an array of sensors that had different different codings on the sensors and all of those sensors responded a specifically to this presence of a scent and we would use at that point 20 years ago a pretty primitive version of AI um called principal component analysis to kind of collapse all of this complicated data and read out a signal that would tell us cancer no cancer and in the past I say that because in the past 20 years it's been such what happened was first and I love what you said um um we had the Human Genome Project which released a whole bunch of data about what are the ATS G's and C's of our DNA um and then what do we do with that information um and not just DNA but proteomics and all these other layers of biological data so we uncovered all of this oil we had no idea what to do with um and so this was all kind of going on in parallel to what we were doing at epibone and um what I love about now and and I'm a lifelong learner my co-founder and I are actually as we speak taking an AI and biofarma class at MIT online right now great class Shameless plug um and it's just it's something that we knew about anyway but I think it just I just bring that up because I think we can always all of us be lifelong Learners and invest in our own exposure to these knowledge modalities or else risk being left behind but also it's just really fun to be a student so um what I love about about this class and I what I love about what's true about AI reflecting back what you said about it being horizontal is that at no matter what what stage of the process we're talking about whether we're like me and Kaa developing Therapeutics that will eventually help people um in the design of those in the discovery of molecules in and what I care a lot about as well in those Downstream activities with clinical trials um how do we interpret the data get early sign on how those molecules are performing or those Therapeutics are performing or decentralize human trials so we can get data from patients in the wild or make smart factories that grow boner cartilage cost effectively um at unit cost economics that payers can pay for and to do the studies that will prove to those payers that what we're doing is cost effective I loved what you said about making that case to the to the the stakeholders so um for us it really is you know the possibilities I don't want to say are endless I think where where you devote your energy because there's always a huge upfront cost five years in your case right there's an upfront cost in time and effort towards picking where you're going to go and and really get the most um juice for the squeeze if you're going to think about lemons and making lemonade and I think where where I I find the most um fruitful Avenues are are around smart factories and decentralized trials for us personally I think that's what also makes UAE really interesting by the way because they don't um the all the AI initiatives around here will allow us to collect noisy data sets from patients in the wild from their wearables and be able to synthesize uh you know discern the signal from the noise um so yeah the possibilities I don't want to say are endless I think they really should be focused on taking labor intensive activities like reading millions of papers um and and and making that more efficient um or in the case of Predictive Analytics being able to see things that humans can't see um you know so I think those are kind of two lenses that I like to apply in terms of how to prioritize really where to apply AI um and curious to hear what others think about it as well LP a lot of biot twins focused on um uh creating a digital twin to for predict predicting I think the the word predictive is very much associated with AI and you look at preventative um medicine can you explain how AI has impacted um biotwin and the different technologies that you're developing yes thank you um so we create a virtual replica of your own biology which is quite complex it wouldn't be possible without AI uh five years ago it would have have been possible to launch biotwin we needed a computing power in the algorithm that exist today uh one one of the type of biomarker that we're tracking there's small molecule called metabolites there's an estimated 4 million metabolites in the human body right now a clinician might be using maybe 50 to 100 so there's a ma major gap between what could be done and what's being done and that's one of the thing biotwin is doing but one of the challenge with those biomarker is they are extremely variable they change all the time there's the they directly reflect what's going on with you and your body right now which you'll guess changes all the time with the environment with what you eat your physical activity so we need AI to make sense of that very very high variability that also differ from one person to another which allow us to personalize dundo treatment medication and other things so we need to understand that so that's that's really the the start and in terms of number it's terabytes and terabytes of data so we lucky for us we're working with major partner like Microsoft and Google so they're helping us making sense of everything because as uh my my co- panelist said it having a lot of data is one thing but making sense of it that's the challenge you also have to make sure you have clean data so it it's all possible with uh AI to be able to make sense of it to deliver something and a concrete outcome that can be used thank you and K with the kind of field of bio resolvable um implants and the work that you've been doing can you walk us through how AI has impacted um your vision for Bio saion yeah definitely uh I think unlike my panelists here we don't utilize AI in the same capacity so if it's all right I'll just take 15 seconds to explain exactly what we do at bios saion um so essentially we are a biotech company that's focused on drug delivery so if you know anyone that's been diagnosed with cancer generally they get IB chemotherapy they're tied to a machine they get insane amount of uh systemic adverse effects you know they lose their hair they end up with complications and other diseases on top of the cancer diagnostic itself so essentially what we do is uh We've managed to create a 3D printed biodegradable drug delivery platform rolls right off the tongue essentially in a nutshell it's a Band-Aid for your cancer so the idea is that you have this mesh that has the exact same type of chemotherapy that you would get systemically but you're able to apply local Al onto the tissue during either minimally invasive surgical procedure or through an outpatient process and you're able to get the same chemotherapy while you're sitting in in this room driving eating sleeping whatever the case might be so that's kind of what we work on um at the moment and we're in the process of starting our clinical trials here in Abu Dhabi and hopefully inshallah by the end of quarter 1 of 2025 we would have launched the clinical trial here so in a nutshell that's what we do um in terms of the utilization of AI uh similar to kind of what our the the panelists here also mentioned we utilize AI to help reduce labor costs right so five years ago it's it's me sitting in a basement somewhere with six laptops and 500 books and 50 papers trying to analyze what the market is doing and where the trends are for the landscape and what's the newest hottest thing well now I just typed that into chat GPT at 7:30 in the morning and it spits it out for me so I think that's the way we really utilize it is it's it's more of like day-to-day and then uh another element that we utilize AI is actually on the clinical trial side so doing patient selection analyzing the data and that's actually through a thirdparty partnership can't say who just yet but you guys probably know they're in the region um so that's another added element and then on the manufacturing side we 3D print our chips so it takes about five minutes for us to make these chips we can do it remotely anywhere in the world um as long as I have a space twice my size essentially uh that's kind of what we need in order to create these therapeutic chips so we utilize AI to main to basically assist with the manufacturing elements to make sure that there are no human errors when it comes down to the mixtur of the materials when it comes down to actually handling the the chips themselves to sterilizing and packaging and ultimately the vision down the line if I may uh you know kind of paint that picture for you is that you're sitting in an O you know a physician's office and you hear the world's terrible news that oh my God you've been diagnosed with cancer but don't worry bios saian is there to save the day because essentially you'll end up going into an O and already will have a scan there that says okay you've you have a tumor that's 2 cmers or 3 cenm and it's shaped like Italy I love Italy so shaped like Italy right and what we can do on our end is you press a couple of buttons on our 3D printer and the 3D printer will be able to make a personalized chip to your tumor tailored for that and have the exact dosage amount so that way we know exactly what the tumor volume is and how much chemotherapy you need to be able to eradicate that tumor so that's the big Vision in how we plan on utilizing AI realistically in the US it's very difficult to get that approval the US is still debating on the definition of what AI is just so you guys understand how young it is in that in that regard but the UAE has uh already been 10 steps ahead I would say I mean they have a UI I'm sorry they have a AI University they have an AI department they have a minister of AI they have all these things to help push that momentum forward and become a thought leadership in that space so what we're planning on doing in five years we think we're able to complete that maybe in four um with the help of the UAE and the do thank you khad I mean this panel is extremely impressive I feel like you're all you know on on this mission to save Humanity from different angles and using techn like both from a deep Tech and you know AI optimizing and utilizing everything that's out there just to wrap up our panel um I would love to hear from each one and one one of you to you know give advice to anyone that's in the audience who's an entrepreneur that's looking at radical disruptive um te you know technology and Innovations in the health and wellness space um in a couple of words um what would you what would you give them start with Nina that's a really insightful question I think the advice I would give especially because we were talking about so much deep Tech and certainly technically difficult challenges we're all facing is the beauty of technology is just one part of the story we need to make sure our Technologies work in our bodies in the clinic and in societ society and if we're going to make sure that our Technologies are going to work in those second and third categories we need to make sure that we're Innovative not just in terms of their technology we're building but in terms of our business model okay and in the case of UAE we have to wait in the US till we do phase one two three then we can sell product okay here the idea of being able to sell and risk share as we develop a product that's an example I when I say business business model Innovation and I think we also need to do work to make sure that we address any potential cultural challenges that we might be facing as well um if we want our Technologies to truly impact Humanity we need to also maybe put on a her Humanities hats and you know collaborate with poets and artists and realize that science fiction often leads the way to science fact so um to remember that we are humans and and to not understate value of the business or um the humanities uh I would say that as we've heard the UAE is definitely leading the pack when it comes to Ai and commitment to Ai and that's amazing it's definitely one of the reasons why I moved from London to Abu Dhabi however the power of AI is really in making data speak and I think we should really really in in the investment community in the business Community to start to look at AI businesses from the perspective of exactly what their superpower is measuring having the ability to measure what that out uh output is what the impact is if that is not present then most of the time you don't have ai so if you do have ai it means you can measure outcomes impact have a return on investment me measure have an outcome measure that's tangible in the absence of that you probably don't have ai uh on my side the the advice I would give entrepreneur is to really think ahead uh I'm sure there's a lot of people that thinks how can we use let's say chat GPT LM mod all to innovate well it's a bit too late uh you need to think what's going to be coming next and to think outside of the box or from a different perspective I like Nina's point of asking artists or our poets to really get a different point of view uh at biotwin we thought of the idea of thinking existing digal twin technology from manufacturing sector and said what if we apply that to human what would it be uh so that's what we're doing now but the challenge is what's going to be the Innovation five years from now or even 10 years from now it's quite hard but that that'd be the challenge or the advice I would tell a future entrepreneur closing uh with a closing remarks as well with some exciting news yeah definitely so I think the advice I would give Founders is it takes twice as long it takes twice as much money and if you think nothing's going to go wrong you're absolutely wrong everything will go wrong that you think will go wrong and that's the reality of being a Founder so I think the utmost characteristics that you need to have is resilience and you need to be able to want the thing that you are building to succeed and I think that's the most important message that I could voice to anybody here is that whatever you're building make sure you you care about it enough to be awake at 3:00 in the morning and still be willing to love what you're doing and I think that's the message here um if I may just for for five seconds I would just also like to take this moment to announce that we've actually successfully closed our prea financing round uh from the region itself with um with global Ventures which is the best venture capital I would say in the region hands down uh golden gates and a very well-known family office in Saudi so we plan on utilizing that Capital to start clinical trials and Manufacturing and I just wanted to shout out hub71 for all the help and support that they gave us to getting it there thank you what uh to close uh this uh amazing heartfelt Pano with these amazing entrepreneurs and innovate innovators thank you so much uh Nina lurena LP and Kia and thank you all for joining us here uh don't go anywhere we have another panel U very shortly um also talking about impact and uh profitability so stay tuned thank you guys Round Up of Applause again for the audience