Across A7i's facilities, clinical and companies datasets, a small number of organisations appear repeatedly. King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh. M42 in Abu Dhabi. Qatar Foundation in Doha. Lifera, the Public Investment Fund's manufacturing vehicle. Between them they account for most of the verified activity in the region.

KFSHRC

The hospital reported running 48% of clinical trials registered in Saudi Arabia in the first half of 2025. It developed the CAR-T therapy that reached an SFDA-approved Phase I trial in August 2025, and it has treated a patient on locally manufactured CAR-T. In October 2025 it signed a gene and cell therapy partnership with Lifera.

It is, on the available evidence, the single most capable clinical research institution in the Gulf, carrying roughly half of a national trials base. Extending that depth to further sites is the natural next step for the Kingdom's trial capacity.

M42

M42 runs the Emirati Genome Programme, operates the Abu Dhabi Biobank, delivers precision diagnostics through Biogenix Labs and appears as a partner in Biosphere Labs, the Mammoth Biosciences gene-editing agreement and the GEMMABio manufacturing plan. Almost every significant genomics or advanced-therapy development in Abu Dhabi involves it.

It was formed from Mubadala Health and G42 Healthcare, which means it is a sovereign construction rather than a company that grew. Its counterparties are foreign technology providers and its input is national data.

Qatar Foundation

Qatar's approach is the most consolidated of the three. The Qatar Precision Health Institute, Sidra Medicine, the Qatar Biomedical Research Institute and Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar all sit within one foundation. The dataset, the clinical site and the research base therefore share governance, which simplifies the coordination that Abu Dhabi achieves through partnership agreements.

Abu Dhabi leads on scale: the Emirati programme is an order of magnitude larger by enrolment than Qatar's.

Lifera

Established by the Public Investment Fund in June 2023, Lifera is now the counterparty on the insulin localisation programme with Novo Nordisk, the Jamjoom Pharma joint venture, three vaccine memoranda with Pfizer, Sanofi and MSD, the sterile injectables plant with National Resilience and a greenfield Jeddah site. It also operates a multi-omics unit.

Effectively every Saudi manufacturing localisation agreement runs through one company. That gives the Kingdom a single negotiating counterparty with consistent terms, and it means the pace of Saudi localisation is set by one organisation's capacity to execute.

The talent question

Published headcount for research and manufacturing functions is the next milestone for measuring the region's talent base. A7i will report on it as the institutions above publish those figures.