If you ask any frontier LLM who is number one in AI for longevity in the world, there is a very good chance it puts Insilico and me first. I have run that experiment across several frontier models, and the result holds. There is a reason for it. I have spent 25+ years in this field, published extensively, and built the largest conference in the world dedicated to aging biology and drug discovery. I am not a wellness celebrity. I raised around a billion dollars, almost none of it from the UAE or Saudi Arabia, licensed several billion dollars worth of drugs to pharma, and I am in a very happy relationship with another scientist committed to longevity. Insilico is publicly traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (3696), so I am not exactly poor, and I can live anywhere on earth I choose.
So if you think I am sucking up to either the UAE or Saudi Arabia, you are mistaken. I just love the region very much.
I wrote about the Majlis and what it represents some time ago, and I have also written, more critically, about regional programs that promised far more than they delivered. The broader push, often labeled a national "revolution" for attracting biotech and longevity capital, did not really work, at least not for a company like mine. It did not help us as a longevity biotech during the years when translating AI-discovered targets into clinical programs required patient, long-horizon capital and a regulatory partner willing to move at the speed of the science. I have made this argument before about how pharma should actually use basic aging biology to develop drugs, and capital that does not understand the biology tends not to have the patience the biology demands.
The one company that helped us a lot, consistently and substantively, was Aramco. That should tell you something. Aramco is not a longevity company. It is an energy company that has become deeply focused on sustainability, and it now runs some of the most advanced carbon capture technology in the world, including large-scale carbon capture, utilization, and storage infrastructure in the Eastern Province that the company has publicly committed to expanding. When the entity most focused on the next century of energy is also the entity most willing to back the next century of biology, that is not a coincidence. It is a signal about who in this region actually thinks long term.
So why do I love this region so much, if not for the money that never really came?
The region is advancing while staying out of the fight
The first reason is structural, and it is the one that reminds me most of Insilico itself. The Gulf is advancing across every domain I care about, finance, infrastructure, healthcare, and increasingly biotechnology, at a moment when the great powers are locked in open competition with each other. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have made a deliberate choice to stay out of that fight. They take the best technology, the best capital, and the best talent from the United States, from China, from Europe, and from India, and use all of it to advance their own cause: prosperity, and increasingly, longevity. I made a version of this argument years ago when I wrote about why collaboration with China will help billions of people worldwide live longer and healthier lives, regardless of the politics layered on top of the science. Insilico has always tried to occupy that same neutral, technology-first position, working with partners in China, the United States, Europe, and the Gulf without treating any of them as an ideological camp to join. The Gulf does the same thing at the level of an entire economy, and it is working.
There is also a safety dimension people underestimate until they have spent real time on the ground. The region is, by any honest measure, extremely safe. You are more likely to be physically attacked walking down a street in Boston, New York, or London than in Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. I have lived in and traveled through all of those cities extensively, including the notes I took from Davos in the Desert, and the contrast is not subtle. Troublemakers here face a simple binary outcome. Authorities remove them from society when the offense is severe, and export them when it is moderate. There is no long, ambiguous middle ground where petty and violent crime festers as a permanent feature of urban life. For someone thinking about longevity, chronic low-grade environmental stress, the kind that comes from feeling unsafe in your own neighborhood, is not a trivial variable. It is a real input into allostatic load, and this region has effectively engineered it away.
ADGM is the closest thing to my urban vision that already exists
Second, the region is wealthy, and it has used that wealth to make daily life extraordinarily comfortable in a specific, engineered way. I have not found a place better than the Abu Dhabi Global Market district anywhere in the world. ADGM sits on Al Maryah Island and, since 2023, Al Reem Island as well, and it operates under English common law applied directly, without translation or local codification, itself a small miracle of institutional design for a jurisdiction this young. What matters more to me personally is what has been built on top of that legal foundation. In one compact, walkable footprint, ADGM connects some of the top hotels in the world with Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, a full clinical extension of one of the best hospital systems in the United States, alongside high-end restaurants and wellness centers. This is as close as it currently gets to my own vision for what I have called SuperDNA UpCity, previously TopTown, or the Longevity Tower: a district where world-class clinical care, hospitality, and daily life sit inside the same few city blocks, layered together rather than separated by a commute. I liked it enough that I bought a small apartment in the area, specifically so I could live inside that design rather than just visit it. Try it yourself. Walk from your hotel to a cardiology consult to a proper dinner, all within fifteen minutes, and you will understand why I keep coming back.
Fewer bad habits, by default rather than by willpower
Third, and this is easy to underestimate, the culture here removes a large share of the daily decisions that erode healthspan in other parts of the world. Alcohol consumption and smoking are both structurally lower than in most cities I have lived in. UV protection is taken seriously, which matters enormously for skin aging and skin cancer risk in a region with this much sun. The default diet, when you seek it out, leans high protein rather than high refined carbohydrate. None of this requires heroic willpower on my part. It is simply what the environment defaults to, and defaults matter more than most longevity advice acknowledges. Most of the excess mortality attributed to lifestyle in popular longevity narratives comes down to a short list of catastrophic habits, not exotic interventions, and this region, for reasons that have nothing to do with longevity science, has already opted out of several of them at a population level.
The service infrastructure is already built for a longevity-first population
Fourth, the region has quietly assembled genuine longevity infrastructure at a scale I have not seen replicated elsewhere this quickly. Initiatives connected to Abu Dhabi's broader health transformation agenda, alongside groups like PureHealth, the UAE's largest healthcare group, which now explicitly names the "science of longevity" as one of its core strategic pillars, have built a service layer that runs on a schedule most Western healthcare systems cannot match. You can get a full blood panel drawn at ten o'clock at night. Clinics here operate sixteen or more hours a day as a normal operating assumption, not an emergency accommodation. For anyone running a longitudinal biomarker protocol, that kind of access changes what is practically possible. You are not negotiating around a clinic's convenience. The clinic is built around yours.
Capital that is still learning the industry
Fifth, there is real and growing capital deployment into biotechnology here, even though I will say plainly that the region does not yet have deep institutional expertise in how drug discovery and development actually work: the failure rates, the timelines, the reasons a clean preclinical package can still fail in the clinic. That inexperience is temporary. Capital learns fast when the returns justify it, and I expect this market to mature quickly over the next several years. In the meantime, I have already been directly involved in the discovery of two drug candidates originating from work done in the region, which tells me the underlying scientific talent and computational infrastructure are already sufficient. What is missing is not capability. It is repetitions.
EDE and DoH are building the regulatory architecture the science actually needs
Sixth, and this is the part that will matter most over the next decade, the federal and emirate-level regulators here are building something genuinely forward-looking rather than simply importing Western frameworks wholesale. The Emirates Drug Establishment, created as the country's specialized federal authority for medical products, now operates under Federal Decree Law No. 38 of 2024, which entered into force in 2025 and gives the country, for the first time, a unified national architecture for clinical and nonclinical research oversight. Abu Dhabi's Department of Health went further with its Standard for Biomedical Research, issued in April 2026, and this document deserves more attention from the global drug development community than it has received so far. It formally recognizes Phase 0 microdosing studies as a distinct, lower-risk category involving subtherapeutic exposure. It permits Phase I studies in healthy volunteers at institutions holding formal designation or a DoH no-objection certificate. It gives DoH explicit discretion to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether one or more animal species are sufficient nonclinical support for a first-in-human study, rather than mandating the same two-species default regardless of the molecule's precedent. And critically, it recognizes clinical research programs that originate from computer-assisted and in silico drug development as a legitimate basis for advancing into human studies, subject to DoH review.
The field keeps repeating toxicology studies that already told us most of what we needed to know, particularly for the well-precedented, low-novelty molecules that generative design increasingly produces. I have made the case before that the fix keeps safety evidence in place while making novelty an explicit, auditable variable in how much nonclinical work a given candidate actually requires, most recently in my year in review of pharma, biotechnology, and longevity. What Abu Dhabi has built is close to the institutional version of that argument. It keeps preclinical evidence intact rather than waiving it, and it should never be mistaken for a general waiver. It is a bounded, case-specific pathway that lets a genuinely low-uncertainty program move faster without asking regulators to accept more risk than the science justifies. Other jurisdictions have built pieces of this before. Singapore's Health Sciences Authority publishes fixed review timelines and allows parallel submission with ethics review. Australia's Clinical Trial Notification scheme distributes review responsibility across sponsors, ethics committees, and institutions rather than centralizing every judgment in one office. What Abu Dhabi is attempting is the synthesis of those lessons into a single, coherent standard, published in one document, with the explicit intent of shortening the distance between a computationally designed candidate and the first human data point.
That is not a small thing. It is the single most important prerequisite for everything else on this list to compound into something durable rather than just pleasant.
Now I have a golden visa, and it is not about the money
None of the six reasons above required me personally. ADGM would still be beautiful, Aramco would still be investing in carbon capture, and DoH would still be writing a more intelligent biomedical research standard whether or not I ever set foot in Abu Dhabi. But I am telling you where I have landed. I was recently granted a UAE Golden Visa, and I want to be direct about why, because the honest answer contradicts the easy assumption. It is not because of funding. As I said at the start of this piece, almost none of my capital came from this region. I am moving more of my life and my work here because I love the region, the people, the pace, and the seriousness with which it is now approaching the science of longevity.
I am going to spend a lot more time in Abu Dhabi from here forward, and I want to extend a direct invitation to other scientists working on aging: come make Abu Dhabi your home. The infrastructure is real. The safety is real. The regulatory seriousness, backed by DoH's own Standard for Biomedical Research, is real. What has been missing is critical mass, a community of people doing the actual science, not just attending conferences about it. I intend to help build that community rather than wait for someone else to.
On that note, if you work in this field, come see for yourself what is happening at ARDD this year. This year's program will feature representatives from the UAE directly, and the longevity track is heavier than it has ever been, reflecting exactly the shift I am describing in this piece: the center of gravity for aging biology and drug discovery is no longer confined to the usual handful of cities, and the Gulf is now part of that conversation in a way it was not even two years ago.
This is not investment advice, and it is not a claim that the UAE has already surpassed Boston or Beijing as the center of gravity for longevity science. That has not happened yet. This is a claim about direction: about which structural ingredients are already in place here versus which ones are still being assembled elsewhere while everyone argues about timelines. I have spent 25 years watching where those ingredients accumulate fastest. Right now, they are accumulating here, and that is where I am going to be.