The Department of Health – Abu Dhabi (DoH), the regulator of the healthcare sector in the Emirate, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Roche Pharmaceuticals Middle East. Reinforcing Abu Dhabi's position as a leading destination for life science, the agreement seeks to enhance innovation, health services and treatment available to patients in the Emirate.

In the presence of Dr Rashed Alsuwaidi, the Executive Director of the Healthcare Workforce Planning Sector at DoH and Michael Oberreiter, Head of Global Access at Roche Pharmaceuticals, the MoU was signed by Dr Asma Al Mannaei, the Executive Director of the Research and Innovation Centre at DoH and Mohamed Elshaarawy, General Manager Roche Pharmaceuticals, UAE.

The MoU features two key pillars of collaboration that will benefit patients in Abu Dhabi. Firstly, the two entities will work together to support the evolution of real-world data collection frameworks in Abu Dhabi, and the subsequent potential evidence generation activities that are targeted to monitor rare and priority diseases as assigned by DoH and agreed upon by Roche.

Enhancing DoH's ability to track and monitor outcomes of therapies will support DoH in making informed clinical and policy decisions for better optimisation of patient outcomes. Furthermore, DoH and Roche will strengthen the research network across Abu Dhabi and improve accrual for potential clinical trials.

Under the MoU, the two entities will advance critical research using real-world data to study and assess the spinal muscular atrophy burden in Abu Dhabi, as well as assessing potential conduction of research and the facilitation of real-world data collection to monitor Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) disease.