U.S. multinational company Abbott entered a partnership with Abu Dhabi's Department of Health to manufacture medicines in the United Arab Emirates capital as part of the country’s effort to strengthen its supply chain and bolster its overall healthcare system.
The deal was inked during the recent BIO International Convention held in Boston and focuses on four key elements that comprise Abbott setting up local production of its pharmaceutical catalog, the development of biosimilars, adopting more digital patient offerings and a healthcare education and workforce development initiative, the two said in a June 20 press release.
Neither financial details nor the overall manufacturing project scope were disclosed.
“By integrating our strategic vision with Abbott’s expertise, we aim to accelerate the development and deployment of innovative healthcare products and solutions, reducing time-to-market, improving healthcare outcomes, and ensuring that breakthrough therapies reach patients faster,” Noura Al Ghaithi, undersecretary of Abu Dhabi's Department of Health, said in the release.
With the deal, Abbott joins other pharmaceutical companies that have set up shop in the Arab country.
In January 2023, San Diego-based National Resilience announced it planned to build a manufacturing facility in the UAE to produce vaccines and therapeutics for cancer, infectious diseases and other disorders. More recently, Resilience said it would close several sites and operate with a leaner footprint.
A month prior to the National Resilience news, the UAE helped drive a deal between AstraZeneca and local company G42 Healthcare to make drugs in Abu Dhabi.
Pharma industry interest in setting up shop in the region was spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic that shed light on weaknesses in the global supply chain and prompted many countries in the region—and elsewhere in the world—to initiate efforts to attract drugmakers.
In late 2021, Saudi Arabia inked a deal with Merck KGaA to support the country’s SaudiVax initiative that focused on designing and building a multimodality biologics manufacturing facility in order to offer a more localized production infrastructure for the Middle East and Northern Africa regions.
This past December, a pair of Saudi agencies—the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources and the Ministries of Investment and Health—partnered with Vertex Pharmaceuticals to help boost the kingdom’s gene therapy production capabilities.