PRECISION MEDICINE AND THE FUTURE OF GENOMICS SUMMIT
قمة الطب الدقيق ومستقبل علوم الجينوم

---

PMFG SUMMIT 2026
December 7–9, 2026 | Qatar National Convention Centre (QNCC), Doha, Qatar

• Welcome Address & Institutional Remarks
• Sidra Medicine & QPHI Leadership Openings

• Opening Keynote Lecture (09:00 – 09:15)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: The Patient Architect: A Family’s Diagnostic Odyssey and the Rise of Patient-Led Genomics
  How one family’s search for answers for their children’s rare disease (PXE) became a model for citizen-driven genomic research — and what it takes to put patient advocacy at the true center of precision medicine, not just its messaging.

• Keynote Presentation (09:15 – 09:30)
  Speaker: Wendy Chung (Boston Children’s and Harvard)
  Topic: The Clinical Reality & Shared Decision-Making
  Bridging the gap between big data and patient care, examine the collaborative models driving precision medicine. The session focuses on the methodology required for families and medical teams to co-architect clinical management strategies using comprehensive multi-omic profiles.

• The CRO Opening Panel (09:30 – 10:00)
  Whose Voice Counts? Patients, Data, and the Future of Shared Care
  Panelists: Wendy Chung (Harvard/Boston Children’s), Manolis Dermitzakis (QPHI), TBD.
  Core Panel Debates: Digital tools capturing patient-contributed data while educating families; friction between clinical workflows and informed patient advocates.

• Revolutionizing the clinical landscape by integrating global genomic data into individualized care frameworks, scaling patient education infrastructure, and deploying collaborative, shared-decision models that put patient advocacy at the core of genomic medicine.

• Keynote Presentation-1 (10:30-10:50)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: Beyond Wealthy Nations: Bringing RNA Therapies to Every Child Who Needs Them
  Leading a global consortium to bring tailored antisense oligonucleotide therapies to children outside the United States — drawing on his experience founding iHope, which has delivered clinical genome sequencing to underserved patients worldwide.
• Keynote Presentation-2 (10:50-11:05)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: From Bench to Blood: Ex Vivo Gene Editing as a Curative Therapy Platform
  

• Industry Spotlight Presentation (11:05 – 11:20)
  Speaker: Alexandra Kropotova (SAB Biotherapeutics)
  Topic: The Biologics Bottleneck: Scaling Up Advanced Manufacturing Pipelines.
  Providing an essential industry perspective on the realities of manufacturing scale-up, detailing the transition from successful academic “moonshot” research to scalable, stable bio-production pipelines.
• Sponsored Presentation (11:20 – 11:35)
  Speaker: Alasdair Thong, CEO, Sovereign Innovation Division (Alloy Therapeutics).
  Topic: Democratizing Drug Discovery: Can Every Nation Build Its Own Medicines?
  Making advanced discovery platforms available to researchers and start-ups worldwide, and why access to biotech infrastructure, not just science, decides who gets to develop next-generation therapies.

One Drug for Millions, or One Drug for You? The Future of Medicine’s Business Model

Chair: Dr. Ammira Akil

• The Challenge: For decades, pharmaceutical companies made their money by developing a single drug for millions of patients — a “blockbuster.” Today, genomics and AI make it possible to create highly targeted therapies for much smaller groups of patients. Can the old business model survive in a world of personalized medicine?
•  Team 1 — Scale Wins (Scale Funds the Future): Big, widely-used drugs are the only way to fund the huge cost of modern drug research.
• Team 2 — Precision Wins (The Future is Agile and Niche): Mass-market drugs are inefficient and outdated — the future is treatments built for smaller, specific patient groups.
• The Wildcard (Neither — Challenges the Premise Itself): Argues that “scale vs. precision” may be the wrong question — that precision therapies can be made affordable at scale through decentralized manufacturing, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Panelist: Boro Dropulić, Executive Director, Caring Cross

• Local Institutions Spotlight
• Local Institutions Spotlight

• Special Fireside Chat (13:15 – 13:45)
  Speaker: Jeremy Walsh, Google DeepMind
  Topic: Federated Learning Architectures for Decentralized Global Research.
  Training AI models across decentralized, multi-institutional genomic datasets without shifting the raw data itself—offering a crucial solution for international collaborations that respect national data privacy laws.

• Diamond Sponsor Presentation-2  (14:00 – 14:20)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: The Compute Behind the Cure: High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for Genomic-Scale AI
  How high-performance computing infrastructure is enabling the massive-scale genomic and AI workloads behind modern drug discovery and population health research — and what compute bottlenecks still stand between today’s science and tomorrow’s breakthroughs.
  

• Diamond Sponsor Presentation-3 (14:20 – 14:40)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: Beyond Diagnosis: Building Public Understanding for Population-Scale Genetic Screening
  Examining what it takes to build public trust and health literacy around population-scale genetic screening programs — and how education and prevention strategies determine whether a screening program’s benefits actually reach the people it’s designed for.

• Platinum Sponsor Presentation-1 (13:40 – 14:55)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: Securing the Genomic Data Pipeline: Networking and Data Infrastructure for Precision Medicine at Scale
  How secure, high-capacity data networking underpins the safe, compliant movement of sensitive genomic and health data across research institutions, hospitals, and national health systems.

• How Diamond and Platinum industry partners provide the computing infrastructure, secure data networks, and public engagement expertise that turn genomic science into real-world impact — the essential, often invisible work that makes precision medicine at scale possible.

• Keynote Presentation (15:30 – 15:50)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: TBC

• Featured Talk-1 (15:50 – 16:05)
  Speaker: Petr Holub (Chief Information Officer, BBMRI-ERIC; Associate Professor, Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
  Topic: Finding Trust at Scale: The Technical and Governance Infrastructure Behind Europe’s Federated Biobank Network
  How BBMRI-ERIC’s Directory and Negotiator systems let researchers securely find and request samples and data across 600+ European biobanks — the technical backbone that makes federated governance actually operational, not just aspirational.

• Featured Talk-2 (16:05 – 16:20)
  Speaker: Ayat Salman (Canadian Primary Research Consortium; Data Lead, Department of Nursing, Université de Sherbrooke)
  Topic: Primary Care as an Untapped Biobank Resource: A Canadian Model
  Reimagining biobanking through everyday primary care touchpoints rather than only hospital or national-registry settings — a structurally different model of population sample and data collection than Europe’s or Qatar’s, drawing on her CIHR-funded research into primary-care-based biobanking.

• Featured Talk-3 (16:20 – 16:35)
  Speaker: Eng. Dana Al Abdullah (Director of Policies Affairs, and Director of Personal Data Privacy Protection Department, National Cyber Security Agency, NCSA)
  Topic: Securing Precision Health Data: National Cyber Assurance and Governance for Sensitive Health Data.
  How Qatar’s National Cyber Security Agency is building governance and cyber-assurance frameworks to protect population-scale genomic and biobank data as national health infrastructure matures.

• Featured Talk-3 (16:35 – 16:50)
  Speaker: Eng. Dana Al Abdullah (Director of Policies Affairs, and Director of Personal Data Privacy Protection Department, National Cyber Security Agency, NCSA)
  Topic: Securing Precision Health Data: National Cyber Assurance and Governance for Sensitive Health Data.
  How Qatar’s National Cyber Security Agency is building governance and cyber-assurance frameworks to protect population-scale genomic and biobank data as national health infrastructure matures.

• Building Trustworthy Biobank Infrastructure — Comparing National and Institutional Models
  Panelists: All Speakers
  Panel focus: How different biobank models — each shaped by different funding realities, regulatory environments, and population needs — approach consent, data quality, and long-term sustainability, and what they can learn from one another.

• How biobanks translate scientific ambition into functioning, trusted infrastructure — examining the governance frameworks, data security standards, and national models that determine whether a population’s genomic and biological samples remain scientifically useful and ethically safeguarded over the long term.

• Welcome Address

• Keynote Speaker 1 (08:30 – 08:50)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: Building Qatar’s Research, Innovation, and Health Ecosystem: From National Strategy to Global Partnership.
• Keynote Speaker 2 (08:50 – 09:10)
  Speaker: Peter Donnelly (CEO, Genomics plc)
  Topic: Polygenic Risk Scores at Population Scale: From Statistical Genetics to National Health System Implementation
  How genome-wide polygenic risk scores move from population genetics methodology to real clinical utility — and what health systems need to get right to deploy PRS-based risk stratification responsibly at national scale.
• Keynote Speaker 3 (09:10 – 09:25)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: Regulating a Moving Target: EMA’s Framework for AI and Continuous-Learning Medical Software
  How Europe’s regulator is building genuinely adaptive frameworks for software that changes after approval — direct, first-hand ecosystem-architect authority rather than a consulting-firm perspective on it.
• Local Innovation Showcase (09:25 – 09:40)
  Speaker: Mohammad Hammoud (Avey/CMU-Q)
  Topic: From Lab to Clinic: Building a Medicine-Native LLM for Real-World Healthcare Delivery
  Drawing on Avey’s development of a full medicine-native large language model — built from the ground up for medicine rather than adapted from a general-purpose model — ahead of its global launch, examining what it takes to move from academic AI research to a clinically deployed tool used in real diagnostic and documentation workflows across Qatar and internationally.
• Featured Presentation (09:40 – 09:55)
  Speaker: Farah Shamout (Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, NYU Abu Dhabi).
  Topic: Beyond Genomics: Multi-Modal AI for Real-World Clinical Prediction
  Developing machine learning methods that fuse heterogeneous real-world data — electronic health records and medical imaging — to predict clinical deterioration and disease risk, with particular attention to whether AI baselines built on Western datasets transfer reliably to Arab and regional populations.

• Ecosystem Alignment: Regulating AI Diagnostics and Digital Medicine Across Borders
  Chair: TBD
  Panelists: TBD
  Focus: Exploring the operational, legal, and safety friction points when global and regional regulatory entities must evaluate frontier innovations that break traditional evaluation models.

• Examining how regulatory systems are adapting to AI-driven medicine at three levels: frameworks for continuous-learning Software-as-a-Medical-Device, evidentiary standards for digital medicine tools, and the practical work of implementing population-scale genomic screening within a national health system.

• Keynote Presentation (11:00 – 11:20)
  Speaker: Daniel Gudbjartsson (Associate Vice President & Site Head, Amgen deCODE genetics, Iceland)
  Topic: Three Decades of a Nation’s Genome: From Discovery to Drug Development at deCODE
  How three decades of population-scale genetic and phenotypic data from Iceland’s founder population have been translated into validated drug targets now progressing through partnerships with global pharmaceutical companies.
• Featured Presentation -1 (11:20 – 11:40)
  Speaker: Andrea Ganna (FIMM-EMBL Group Leader, University of Helsinki/HiLIFE)
  Topic: Deep Learning on a Nation’s Health Trajectories: AI-Driven Disease Risk Prediction from FinnGen
  Applying novel statistical and deep learning approaches to Finland’s population-scale genetic and longitudinal health registry data to identify individuals at elevated risk of common, preventable diseases before onset — enabling targeted early intervention.
• Featured Presentation-2 (11:40 – 11:55)
  Speaker: Joachim De Jonghe (Francis Crick Institute, UK)
  Topic: Beyond the Coding Genome: Non-Coding Variants as the Next Frontier in Target Discovery
  Using saturation genome editing to systematically interpret non-coding variants and gene regulation — including the discovery of RNU4-2 variants as the cause of the prevalent ReNU syndrome — to identify novel therapeutic targets that coding-only pipelines miss.
• Featured Presentation-3 (11:55 – 12:10)

• Speaker: Larry Stack (Chief Commercial Officer – Quantinuum, USA)
  Topic: Quantum Computing Meets Genomics — Accelerating Drug Discovery Through the Quantinuum-Sidra Partnership.

• Bridging AI-driven target discovery and generative design with population-scale genomic resources and regulatory pathways for clinical adoption.

• Diamond Sponsor Presentation (14:00 – 14:20)
  Speaker: Illumina
  Topic: What Population-Scale Sequencing Actually Reveals: Lessons from National Genomic Screening Programs Worldwide
  Drawing on real-world national screening deployments, examining what large-scale sequencing data has taught us about disease prevalence, variant interpretation at scale, and the scientific trade-offs that determine whether population genomic findings translate into actionable public health impact.
• Diamond Sponsor Presentation (14:20 – 14:40)
  Speaker: Twist Bioscience
  Topic: Closing the Diversity Gap: What Synthetic DNA and Target Enrichment Reveal About Underrepresented Genomes
  How target enrichment and synthetic DNA methods are uncovering genetic variation missed by reference-genome-biased approaches, and what this means scientifically for building pangenomes that actually capture global human diversity rather than a narrow ancestral sample.
• Diamond Sponsor Presentation (14:40 – 15:00)
  Speaker: Abomics
  Topic: The Evidence Gap in Pharmacogenomics: What It Takes Scientifically to Move from Association to Actionable Prescribing
  Examining the scientific and clinical-validation challenges in pharmacogenomic implementation — from establishing genotype-phenotype evidence strength to defining what “actionable” actually means — and what real-world clinical outcomes data shows about impact at the point of care.

• Showcasing the platform infrastructure, synthetic biology tools, and pharmacogenomic translation technologies underpinning population-scale genomic screening and precision medicine.

• Local Institution Spotlight (14:30 – 15:00)
  Speaker: Markus Wenk (HBKU, Hamad Bin Khalifa University)
  Topic: HBKU’s College of Health and Life Sciences: Building Qatar’s Genomic and Precision Medicine Talent Pipeline
  An update from CHLS on its growing role in Qatar’s genomic medicine ecosystem — research initiatives, academic programs, and institutional partnerships shaping the next generation of scientists and clinicians in the field.
• Local Institution Spotlight (15:10 – 15:20)
  Speaker: Moza Al-Kuwari (HMC, Hamad Medical Corporation)
  Topic: Genomic Medicine in Everyday Clinical Practice: A View from Qatar’s National Health System
  How Qatar’s main public healthcare provider is integrating clinical genomic testing and precision medicine into routine patient care — from diagnostic genetics to pharmacogenomics — at the scale of a national health system.
• Local Institution Spotlight (15:20 – 15:30)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: TBC

• Pediatric Infrastructure Spotlight (15:30 – 15:50)
  Speaker: Hakon Hakonarson (CHOP, USA)
  Topic: Scaling Genomic Discovery Into Pediatric Practice: Lessons from a Decade at CHOP
• Diagnostic Breakthrough Spotlight (15:50 – 16:10)
  Speaker: Bekim Sadikovic (Head, Molecular Diagnostics Program, Schulich School of Medicine, Canada).
  Topic: Beyond the Genome: DNA Methylation Episignatures in Rare Disease Diagnostics.
• National Policy Spotlight (16:10 – 16:30)
  Speaker: Lili Milani (Head, Estonian Biobank; Professor of Pharmacogenomics, University of Tartu, Estonia).
  Topic: From Biobank to Bedside: Pharmacogenomics at National Population Scale.
• Implementation Science Spotlight (16:30 – 16:50)
  Speaker: TBC
  Topic: Why Interventions Succeed or Fail in Practice: Lessons from Implementation Science for Population Health Programs.

• How novel molecular diagnostics, population-scale pharmacogenomic infrastructure, and the psychology of risk communication together determine whether genomic evidence actually reaches patients — moving from research finding to national-scale, real-world clinical impact.

• Topic: Operational pathways required to translate rare variant findings into everyday metabolic and pediatric clinical care.
• Bedside Integration Panel: Reviewing standard reporting tools and clinical decision support systems for frontline physicians, highlighting insights from Sidra Medicine Pediatric Genomic Protocols.

• Overcoming operational barriers to automate genomic variant analysis right at the point-of-care.
• Transitioning highly specialized genetic discoveries into everyday pediatric workflows and family clinical management.

• Health Economics Briefing: Financial structures and cost-effectiveness models needed to transform deep genomic sequencing from reactive screening into standard preventive care.
• Cross-Sector Alignment Panel: Designing modern value-based coding systems between national healthcare systems, private insurance giants, and sovereign funds, featuring Local Academic and Health Economics Experts.

• Overcoming funding gridlocks for deep sequencing panels and individualized genetic therapeutics.
• Creating sustainable financial frameworks that align the risk profiles of health insurance bodies with multi-omic clinical providers.

• Topic: Breakthroughs in complete Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) assemblies to map highly complex genomic regions.
• Topic: Resolving clinical data gaps by functional interpretation of unique variants within Middle Eastern cohorts, featuring data-sharing insights from Qatar Genome and Local Biobanking Teams.

• Exploring how environmental data and machine learning architectures open up new investable tech markets.
• Evaluating startup solutions built to optimize multi-ethnic clinical trial recruitment and digital patient tracking.

• Summit Resolution & Call to Action: Final cross-border reflections compiling a regional blueprint for data governance and clinical diagnostics pipelines.
• The Grand Finale Closing Debate: High-level panel reviewing the next decade of genomic medicine and global health disparities.
• PMFG 2026 Awards Ceremony: Presentation of abstract awards, young investigator honors, and poster prizes.

• Ecosystem Mobilization: Unifying 3 days of regulatory, scientific, and financial insights into an actionable Pan-Arab strategy roadmap.
• Honoring Excellence: Celebrating top-tier international and local research discoveries that drive precision medicine forward.