FUTURE BEAT newsletter

"I am so lucky to be here." Not enough people were able to say that during the pandemic, but if you live in the UAE it has been a common refrain for much of the last two years.

The country's handling of Covid-19 is the envy of many parts of the world, and it often made me wonder what, if anything, was being learned. Could all of the tech and collaboration that was put into overdrive to address the public health crisis result in strides elsewhere? Speaking to leaders from the Department of Health and G42 Healthcare in Abu Dhabi - two of the biggest influences over the make or break nature of the pandemic - I got my answers on?what comes next?(see The Big Story below).

And in the latest on the Musk-Twitter saga, Saudi Arabian billionaire?Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has entered the fray?(on Twitter, of course) and the board will decide over the next few days what to do. Musk has framed his offer as advancing freedom of speech, but US regulators may instead want to mull the apparently unfettered freedom of wealth.

Be well.

Kelsey Warner, Future Editor

The Big Story

With pandemic well controlled, Abu Dhabi charts new healthcare path

In brief?| The UAE's strong performance during the pandemic was not a foregone conclusion: healthcare costs were on the rise when Covid-19 took hold and the country had a shortage of nurses relative to Western nations. Yet on Bloomberg's monthly global Covid-19 resilience ranking the UAE regularly sits in the top three. In Abu Dhabi, leaders in healthcare, emboldened by managing the public health crisis, are now thinking about what comes next. Priorities are: capturing the world's first population-wide genetic library, pioneer connected health and build on previous collaborations with pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and AstraZeneca in medical research.

Quoted?| “We are all taking drugs that have been definitely tested on a Caucasian population, and we're just assuming it works for us. What we're trying to solve is potentially working with pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca, or Pfizer to bring them into Abu Dhabi, leverage this data set that works on a diverse population, and create something that works for all." - Ashish Koshy, CEO of G42 Healthcare

Why it matters?| Leveraging its diverse population and a single platform for patient data known as Malaffi, Abu Dhabi is pitching itself as a destination for clinical trials and cutting-edge research with the infrastructure to perform the tough science right in its own backyard. These were stated aims even before the pandemic, but a boost in public trust with Covid-19 well managed and investment in life science fields like genomics and personalised medicine means the strategy has new ways of working.

Future in Focus

One to watch?| The?development of permanent carbon removal technology?got a shot in the arm from major tech players this week with the launch of Frontier, a new model for climate finance. The founding companies, which include Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey and Stripe, will invest nearly $925 million over the next nine years to purchase permanent carbon removal solutions from manufacturers worldwide.

Marhaba, Noor?| The world's?biggest natural language processing model for the Arabic language?was unveiled this week by Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute. The Noor model may give the Arab world a new edge in the push to digitalise - as tools like chatbots, market intelligence and machine translation skew heavily to English and Chinese-speaking markets.

'Keeping the dream alive'?| Clean energy spending earmarked by governments in response to the coronavirus crisis has?surged 50 per cent over the past five months?to reach $710 billion globally. Market dynamics like an energy crunch and the Russia-Ukraine war had cast doubt on short-term prospects for green investments.

Predicting the future | Signal or noise??Zero-commission trading app Robinhood Markets has?activated its long-awaited Crypto Wallet feature, giving more than 2 million users a fee-free option to store and transfer digital currencies.

This is noise.?Robinhood, a pandemic stock amid an uptick in lockdown-era hobby traders, holds a tiny portion of market share of retail and crypto investors. Analysts at Goldman Sachs said they expect Robinhood's business to further decline as users become less engaged. Crypto wallets are an important part of mainstreaming the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but this is not the major splash the crypto community needs to become a part of everyday commerce.

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Scientists?reverse ageing in human skin?by 30 years.

And is Zoom?pulling us into hybrid?life, not just hybrid work?