Abu Dhabi Biobank and Cleveland Clinic tie up on UAE cancer biobank
Abu Dhabi Biobank has entered a research partnership with Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi to collect, store and sequence cancer-related biological samples from patients at the hospital's Fatima bint Mubarak Center. The collaboration, announced on 13 October 2026, is described as the first of its kind in the UAE and aims to link routine clinical cancer care directly to biobank infrastructure for translational research.
Under the arrangement, patients attending the Fatima bint Mubarak Center are invited on a voluntary, informed-consent basis to contribute blood and tumour tissue samples during regular medical visits. Those samples are transferred to Abu Dhabi Biobank's facility in Masdar City, where they are processed and stored alongside germline and somatic sequencing data. The pilot will cover all cancer types, ranging from breast and pancreatic cancer to rarer presentations, with somatic sequencing of tumour tissue planned for every consenting participant.
What the biobank will do
A stated priority of the initiative is the development of patient-derived organoids: laboratory models grown from a patient's own tumour tissue that can be used to test how a cancer responds to different drugs before those treatments are applied clinically. Combined with germline and somatic sequencing data held centrally, the resource is intended to support studies of tumour evolution, treatment resistance and the molecular basis of personalised therapy choices.
Paul Downey, General Manager of Abu Dhabi Biobank, framed the collaboration in terms of long-term public value. "By responsibly safeguarding patient samples and associated health data over time, we are building a resource that enables researchers to better understand cancer as it affects so many people across the world, while ensuring trust, transparency and long-term societal benefit remain at the core of everything we do," he said.
Dr Stephen R. Grobmyer, Institute Chief of the Cancer Institute at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, added that the partnership would improve representation of regional patient populations in global cancer research, an area where Middle Eastern and broader Gulf cohorts have historically been under-represented in published datasets.
Regional context
Abu Dhabi Biobank has a stated capacity for five million pan-human samples linked to health data, positioning it among the larger national biobank infrastructures outside Europe and North America. The partnership with Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi adds oncology-specific depth, complementing broader population-health collections.
The Fatima bint Mubarak Center was recently designated an Oncology Centre of Excellence for Breast Cancer by the Department of Health Abu Dhabi, and the press release notes that it became the first centre in the Gulf Cooperation Council to participate in a therapeutic breast cancer trial with AstraZeneca. A heavy ion therapy facility is also under development at the site, which would be the first of its kind in the Middle East.
The initiative sits within Abu Dhabi's broader ambition to position itself as a regional hub for biomedical research, a goal that has attracted significant investment in life sciences infrastructure over the past several years. For the research community, the key near-term milestone will be the publication of pilot data and the recruitment figures from the initial consenting cohort, which will indicate how quickly the biobank can reach a scale useful for population-level genomic studies.