New technologies like genomic medicine coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) can cut diagnosis times of rare diseases drastically, according to some experts in the UAE.
Researcher Dr. Imane Boudellioua gave the example of a previous project she worked on. “We had a cohort of 19 patients who took three years to get a diagnosis for an extremely rare genetic disease called congenital hypothyroidism,” she said. “From their DNA sequence, it is very difficult to identify the disease. Using AI, by integrating data from multiple sources, we were able to cut the time taken to identify the disease to just one day.”
Her comments came on the sidelines of a panel discussion about exploring precision medicine and preventive health innovation that took place at the University of Birmingham in Dubai on Thursday.
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Dr. Imane, who currently works as the Senior Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, said the future of medicine was very promising with new technologies. “With AI, there are so many things you can do that would have a direct impact on people’s lives,” she said. “It will cut down the burden of finding a diagnosis. In the future, there will be more tailored treatment for each individual genetic make-up. So instead of prescribing the same medication for everyone, it will actual prescribe down to the dosage that is suitable for this person based on his or her genetic composition.”
Multidisciplinary efforts
Her views were supported by Dr. Mohammed Uddin, Associate Professor of Human Genetics at the Mohammed Bin Rashid of Medicine and Health Sciences.
“Multiple verticals like AI and genomic medicine need to converge together,” he said. “The current technology can read the DNA and find a genetic mutation. We are plugging in multiple machine learning algorithms to find out how the mutation is impacting the protein structure.”
Once doctors have this information, they can give more personalised medication to the patient. Dr. Ahmad Abou Tayoun, Director of Al Jalila Genomics Center & Associate Professor of Genetics Al Jalila Children’s Specialty Hospital & Mohammed Bin Rashid University Of Medicine and Health Sciences gave the example of how artificial intelligence was able to find a new class of antibiotics drugs in 2020. “This is where we jump from AI being applied to a chess game to AI being used to cure diseases,” he said.
The antibiotics discovered by AI can kill MRSA, a drug-resistant bacteria that can cause deadly infections and kills thousands of people every year.
Challenges
Despite the promising future, the experts admitted that there were many challenges facing precision medicine. One of them was the lack of IT structures, according to Major Dr. Mohamed Al Marri, Director of the Genome Center, Dubai Police. “A single person’s genome take up 1 terrabyte of space,” he said. “Where are you going to store this data? As we know, there is a global chip shortage.”
Another challenge facing researchers is the lack of clear rules governing patient confidentiality while doing genomic sequencing. “Everything moves at such a fast pace that the regulations are trying to catch up with it,” said Dr. Hinda Daggag, Director of Healthcare at PwC Middle East. “We need to figure out what is an efficient of catching up. The patient privacy, confidentiality and patient rights in general need to be preserved.”