Arcera Life Sciences a global life sciences firm based in Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co Ltd, an innovation-led international pharmaceutical and healthcare company, have announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This agreement establishes a long-term strategic partnership focused on licensing, advancing technologies, driving neuroscience innovation, and creating value across the global life sciences landscape.

Aligned with the broader Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between China and the UAE, as well as Abu Dhabi’s Healthcare Life Sciences Vision 2030, the MoU aims to unlock new avenues for innovation and market access in both regions. By combining Fosun Pharma’s strong research, development, and manufacturing expertise with Arcera’s global commercial reach and market access capabilities, the partnership positions Abu Dhabi as a key gateway connecting Chinese biotech innovation with international markets. It also seeks to accelerate patient access to cutting-edge treatments across the Middle East and beyond.

Under the agreement, the two companies will explore collaboration in three primary areas:

Isabel Afonso, CEO of Arcera, noted that the agreement represents a significant milestone in building a globally connected life sciences ecosystem anchored in the UAE. She emphasized that combining Fosun Pharma’s drug development expertise with Arcera’s commercial and manufacturing strengths creates a powerful model for accelerating innovation and improving patient access. She also highlighted that this partnership marks Arcera’s first major step in positioning Abu Dhabi as a link between Asian innovation and global markets.

Xingli Wang, Co-President of Fosun Pharma and CEO of its Innovative Medicines Division, described the partnership as an important step in expanding the company’s global footprint and strengthening international collaboration. He expressed confidence that Fosun Pharma’s decades of experience in R&D and manufacturing would support the partnership’s success and stated that both organizations aim to work closely together to bring innovative therapies to patients across the Middle East and worldwide.

Belief BioMed (“BBM”) and Grand Life Sciences Group Co., Ltd. (“Grand Life Sciences”) have entered into an exclusive partnership agreement. As part of the deal, Belief BioMed will provide Grand Life Sciences with commercialization rights for its investigational therapy, BBM-H803, across Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.

This partnership reflects both companies’ commitment to combining their expertise and resources to speed up the product’s path to market, expand access to innovative treatments for patients with hemophilia A, and support the advancement of gene therapy. The agreement was formalized by Xiao Xiao, Co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Science Officer of Belief BioMed, and Zenghui Feng, Chairman of Grand Life Sciences.

Dr. Xiao Xiao stated that Belief BioMed is dedicated to advancing gene therapy, with a pipeline addressing both rare and common diseases to meet significant unmet medical needs. He highlighted the company’s milestone in 2025 with the launch of China’s first gene therapy for hemophilia B, BBM-H901, which introduced a new treatment option for patients. Looking ahead to hemophilia A, he expressed enthusiasm for the collaboration, noting that Belief BioMed’s clinical development strengths, combined with Grand Life Sciences’ commercialization expertise, will help accelerate bringing new gene therapies to patients in China.

Zenghui Feng emphasized that the partnership marks an important strategic step in strengthening Grand Life Sciences’ innovative portfolio. By leveraging the blood product resources of its subsidiary, Grand Shuyang, along with its deep experience in hematology, the company aims to work closely with Belief BioMed to advance hemophilia A treatment. He added that integrating advanced research capabilities with established commercialization infrastructure will help improve patient access more quickly, with the ultimate goal of reducing the burden of frequent treatments and minimizing the risks associated with bleeding episodes for patients.

Basecamp Research, a cutting-edge AI lab focused on biological design, has unveiled the Trillion Gene Atlas—an ambitious scientific program aimed at generating and modeling genomic data at an unprecedented trillion-gene scale. Developed in collaboration with Anthropic, Ultima Genomics, and PacBio, and supported by NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure, the initiative seeks to increase known genetic diversity by 100 times. It plans to gather genomic information from over 100 million species across thousands of global locations.

This effort builds on Basecamp Research’s expanding network of biodiversity partners worldwide. The long-term vision is to create a vast and diverse dataset that allows AI systems to learn from evolution and enable the on-demand design of new medicines.

Speaking at SXSW in Austin, Co-founder and CEO Glen Gowers noted that current biological AI models rely on a limited representation of Earth’s biodiversity. He explained that the Trillion Gene Atlas will dramatically expand the genetic landscape available for analysis, introducing a new era of programmable therapeutic design powered by large-scale data.

Comparable in scope to the Human Genome Project, the initiative was introduced during SXSW’s Health Track and at the NVIDIA GTC conference in San Jose.

Tackling the Biological Data Gap
Despite rapid growth in model size and computational capabilities, progress in AI-driven drug discovery has been constrained by limited data diversity. Most existing sequence-based models depend heavily on a small set of public databases, with a large portion trained on fewer than 250 million genetic sequences.

To address this, Basecamp Research introduced its EDEN foundation models earlier this year. These models are trained entirely on BaseData™, a proprietary genomic dataset that exceeds the size of all public repositories combined. By incorporating over 10 billion previously unknown genes from one million newly identified species, EDEN has revealed new scaling principles for AI in biology.

This expansion has enabled EDEN to move beyond prediction, allowing it to design therapeutics directly from disease prompts. In laboratory tests, the model demonstrated zero-shot functionality in human T-cells without relying on clinical or human-derived data. It has also produced promising results across multiple advanced applications, including AI-driven gene insertion and the creation of targeted antimicrobial peptides with high success rates.

The Trillion Gene Atlas builds on this foundation by significantly increasing both the scale and contextual richness of genomic data available for AI training.

Expanding a Global Biodiversity Network
Over the past six years, Basecamp Research has established a network of scientific collaborators spanning 31 countries. This has enabled the development of a scalable genomics pipeline designed specifically for AI applications. Using innovative regulatory frameworks and off-grid DNA sequencing technologies, the company is able to collect high-quality genetic data from remote ecosystems often inaccessible to traditional labs.

These partnerships emphasize knowledge sharing, local capacity building, and fair access and benefit-sharing agreements aligned with emerging global standards. As part of the Atlas initiative, new collaborations have been announced in Chile and Argentina, along with expanded research efforts in Antarctica.

Advancing Sequencing and Computing Capabilities
The Trillion Gene Atlas is made possible by breakthroughs in high-throughput sequencing and accelerated computing. Partnerships with Ultima Genomics and PacBio enable large-scale sequencing, including highly accurate long-read data that preserves detailed genomic context.
Ultima’s latest sequencing platform, the UG200 Series, is designed for industrial-scale genome and multi-omics sequencing at lower costs, making projects like the Atlas feasible. Meanwhile, PacBio’s HiFi sequencing technology provides precise, information-rich data critical for training advanced biological AI systems.

NVIDIA’s computing infrastructure will power the processing of massive genomic datasets at the petabase level. By leveraging tools like NVIDIA Parabricks, Basecamp aims to dramatically accelerate metagenomic analysis. Tasks that previously could have taken over two decades are now expected to be completed in under two years through parallel processing, automation, and large-scale model training.

Toward End-to-End AI-Driven Therapeutic Design
Anthropic is contributing to the initiative by integrating its AI system, Claude, with scientific platforms. The goal is to combine Claude’s reasoning capabilities with EDEN’s therapeutic design functions and NVIDIA’s data processing tools to create a seamless workflow—from interpreting complex biological data to generating targeted treatments.

Built on three core pillars—large-scale DNA sequencing, global data partnerships, and advanced computing—the Trillion Gene Atlas represents a major step toward transforming how biological data is used. By expanding evolutionary datasets 100-fold, Basecamp Research aims to accelerate drug discovery, improve precision in therapeutic design, and extend advances in areas such as gene therapy and antimicrobial resistance.

Almost everyone is a carrier for a genetic disorder. 1 (Probably even you) (Probably even you.) Being a carrier means you inherited an abnormal copy of a gene from one parent but have no symptoms because your other parent inherited a normal copy of that gene. If you reproduce with another carrier of the same disorder, your child has a 25% chance of inheriting two abnormal copies of the same gene and developing symptoms.

Cystic fibrosis, the most common of these "autosomal recessive disorders," is frequently fatal. Every year, approximately 2500 babies are born with it in the United States, and on average, they do not live past the age of 30. One in every twenty Americans is an unaffected carrier who risks passing the disease on to their children2—and they usually aren't aware of it.

These possibilities can be discovered through genetic testing. Prospective parents can test before getting pregnant, and embryos created through in vitro fertilization can be tested as well. Genetic screening has become more affordable over time, and DNA sequencing and genotyping technologies are becoming faster and more efficient, but one bottleneck persists: a shortage of genetic counsellors who can interpret and educate on test results. According to data presented in 2018, the United States had one genetic counsellor for every 81,700 people, and there are still fewer than 8000 genetic counsellors worldwide. What can be done to address this shortage, given the critical role that carrier screening can play in health care?

If there aren't enough human brains to go around, perhaps a silicon brain could help. Igentify, a digital health company founded in 2016, has developed a platform that scales the genetic counselling process. The platform can digitally educate patients about the genetic test they'll receive, register patients and obtain their consent for screening, analyze their genomic data to identify those at risk, generate lab reports, and for the majority of patients who are low-risk or test negative, the platform can generate personalized animated videos explaining individual results, eliminating the need for a face-to-face follow-up appointment with a genetic counsellor.

The Igentify platform is a DNA-to-results genomic medicine workflow that can be customized to benefit patients, labs, and genetic counsellors. Its personalized education and patient result videos draw from a vast library of individual story components created by Igentify's own animators, allowing it to seamlessly tailor videos to each patient's circumstances in multiple languages. According to Amanda Swiatocha, Igentify's vice president of marketing, the shareable, rewatchable three-to-eight-minute videos explain the patient's test results, including definitions and suggested next steps "all in regular language I—or any patient—can understand, not super-technical terms."

Igentify's platform, according to Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Doron Behar, could free up vast amounts of time by absorbing tedious, repetitive tasks, allowing the human genetic counsellors we do have to focus on the patients who are most at risk. His goal is for the platform to be "the autonomous driving of genomics."

One would think that the average person would prefer a face-to-face appointment over an automated video, but the company's data show otherwise. A clinical study of 225 couples who requested preconception genetic screening found that 94% were comfortable receiving their results via video. In addition, 156 of the 165 couples who were found not to be carriers of the same abnormal gene did not require face-to-face counselling.

“People are quite busy,” said Behar.

“None of us today has time to look at something—even six minutes people tell me is too much. They want to know the answer very fast. And many people are afraid of the human interaction between patient and provider, which, of course, is a holy principle of medicine. But we live in reality, and the reality is, health care providers have very limited time for each patient, and patients have limited time, too.” Plus, it doesn’t take a research study to know that younger generations prefer to consume content digitally; videos can communicate more information in less time by including graphics and charts than a counselor could through words alone.

Igentify will interpret the results of the Illumina Global Diversity Array with Carrier Screening Content v2 (for research purposes only), a single product that screens for 600 different autosomal recessive disorders. It has a low residual risk for key disorders and a high detection rate for both structural and sequence variants.

Any given genetic condition may be rare on its own, “but cumulatively we’re speaking about one in 300 kids being born with some kind of recessive genetic disorder,” Behar went on to explain, “half of which (1 in 600) are severe. These are the genes we’re trying to target.”

Technology such as this can definitely help with increased awareness of the available solution. The key to public awareness according to Behar is “campaigns, campaigns, campaigns.”

The National Society of Genetic Counselors is leading on that front and is spreading the word with efforts like Genetic Counselor Awareness Day  wherein it hosts webinars, offers a media tool kit, and promotes other resources.

Behar started his career as an internal medicine and critical care physician, but pursued his PhD in population genetics and then a medical residency in genetics because rather than treating the sick, he says, “I want to treat the healthy population. Why? Prevention. Prevention is the best treatment. The most important thing, for me, is to have actionable information early enough to give a couple all the potential treatment modalities, so they can make an informed decision.”

To know more on about the Igentify platform, click here .