Saudi Arabia's biotech momentum: inside RGMBS 2026

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from Le Biotech. I'm Dylan Kussain, and this is episode two eighteen for the podcast. Saudi Arabia has spent recent years building one of the most ambitious biotech gatherings in the region, the Riyadh Global Medical Biotechnology Summit. This September, the fourth edition brought together delegations from more than 57 countries and over 200 speakers closing with more than 40 agreements and initiatives worth over $1,300,000,000 From gene editing and genomics to AI driven drug discovery and biomanufacturing, the Summit is positioning itself as a serious node in the global biotech map, and it's timed deliberately, arriving just weeks before BioEurope. To unpack what happened in Riyadh, what it means for Saudi Arabia's biotech ambitions, and how the summit connects to the conversations happening at BioEurope, I'm joined by Abdulaziz Aldayel, a nanomedicine researcher at the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center. He's going to tell us exactly what went on at RGMBS in 2026. Abdul Aziz, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Thank you, Dylan. Glad to be here. Tell me a little bit about your background, your work in nanomedicine. What led you to this role that you have today with RGMBS? Sure, so I have a managerial role which is the deputy chair of collaboration partnerships, connecting scientists together, working on really cool projects in biotech. But as a scientist, I'm an associate scientist in nanomedicine and what led me to nanomedicine, I'm a big believer that nano is our body language and I keep telling my student this at the graduate program of nanopharmaceutical that nano is actually our body language. Is how our cells communicate through exosomes, our immune cells communicate to other cells through the immunoglobulin. Of these are within nano size. So it is fascinating, think it's the future of medicine. What was it that actually drew you to biotech, to medical research in the first place? So to answer this I'll have to go back twenty years ago. When I started my bachelor at the College of Medicine, just wanted to be a doctor like a lot of people at the time, and it was in Australia. And I remember getting into the medical genetics course and we had a really cool professor, I'm not sure if he hear us, Kevin, and he spoke about his thesis and it was about cancer genetics and all of these different mutations for cancer. And they, what they found is a lot of these mutations they didn't understand. Then we did the pathology afterwards, and a lot of rare genetic diseases, they said we don't have any cure for it because it's genetic. That was in 2007 where they thought a lot of the DNA, 90% of DNA is junk DNA. We don't do anything with it. So I was like, no, I had to step in as a young fresh bachelor student, and I did my master's in biotechnology and that's when I learned about cloning, gene …