UAE doctor who went viral for brave stance during Covid returns after 20 years
The Emirates-based oncologist, who garnered online attention in 2020 after choosing to stay in the USA to treat Covid patients instead of returning home, has come back after two decades of living overseas. He now has two primary goals: diminish the cost of one of the most pricey therapies for cancer and eliminate the stigma associated with the “C word cancer.”
Dr Ajlan Al Zaki's first concern regarding his patients in the UAE was a pervasive fear of cancer. “It’s okay to say the C word. Many patients circle in with certain apprehensions. They hear the word cancer and that brings in shock. There are concerns, which is quite reasonable. They just want to check out if they are all right. That sort of awareness needs to be spread out where cancer is not a necessarily a bad word,” he noted.
Something else that intrigued him was noticing how his country patients take everything so literally. “We tend to use ‘Dr. Google’ or AI,” Al Zaki claimed. “I do try to tell my patients that they can Google a bit, but they should not take everything they read at face value.”
Dr. Al Zaki, a US-based and recently transitioned to a UAE triple-board certified haematologist and oncologist, went viral in the middle of the pandemic period in 2020 when the government instructed citizens outside the UAE to come back, but al Zaki decided to stay and fulfill his role as a physician.
He is the current director of Burjeel Haematology Oncology and Cellular Therapy Centre and a specialist in CAR-T cell and Advanced Immunotherapies. “The support has come from the UAE over the few years. During that time, I was navigating my own journey of acquiring all that experience and figuring out how much I have to integrate said experience before feeling ready to bring everything back,” said Al Zaki.
Economical CAR-T Cell Therapy
As of today, he has not only mastered the art of healing cancer patients but is also trying to reduce the cost of perhaps the most personalized and expensive cancer treatment – chimeric antigen receptor CAR-T cell therapy. This is a treatment out of all other forms of treatment because it involves an extreme amount of personalisation. What happens in this treatment is that a patient’s T-cells are extracted in the body, modified to recognize a marker on the cancerous cell and later on fight that cell after the modified T-cells are injected back into the patient. Due to the high degree of individualisation required, the treatment is expensive—per infusion treatment can cost up to $1 million.
During the first day of the Abu Dhabi Global Health Week Event, which Burjeel Holdings partnered with Caring Cross during the event. Caring Cross is a US-based non-profit organization and together the Burjeel Holdings were able to drive down the price set for CAR T cell based therapy to almost 90% of what it cost internationally. Al Zaki quoted saying, “It could be up to 90 percent, where that bar is going to be in the UAE, we don't know. But I know for sure that we can provide it at a lower cost than what's commercially approved,”
Al Zaki illustrated how costs might be brought down this significantly owing to the technology Caring Cross provided for the local manufacture of the cells. “When you're programming the CAR-T cells, consider it as downloading software on your iPhone. So, you have your iPhone, which is your T cells. If you want to upgrade your iPhone, you have to download software,” he explained.
Al Zaki elaborated: “It’s the software sometimes which can be really expensive. And so, what Caring Cross does is they make the software, and they provide it at a significantly reduced cost. And we use that software to then upgrade the T cells.”
“I want people to have access to these kinds of therapies anywhere in the world. That's why we went into medicine,” he reiterated.
Shifting from engineering to medicine
While he was initially pursuing his studies as a chemical engineer, Al Zaki encountered a professor who advised him to consider taking up some research. At that point in time, Al Zaki was thinking of going to work for one of the oil companies in the UAE.
That insightful discussion made him consider switching to research for a career. As the lecturer said, “to me the idea of cancer was always fascinating; how do we diagnose cancer? How do we treat it? What are new methods we are using to prevent the occurrence of cancer?”
After six years of vigorous research, and a PhD later, it was Al Zaki’s true calling to delve deeper and pursue medicine followed by attending medical school.
Help inspired Al Zaki from when his grandfather was diagnosed with cancer around the year 2012, at the late stage. He realized his passion was to help people through their toughest times, whether it was physically, mentally, or emotionally.
In his grandfather’s condition, Al Zaki empathized the notion how important it was to “be there for the person,” and to offer comfort. “Sometimes the strongest therapy that you can give to a person, you don’t give via the mouth or the vein, you give through the ear,” Al Zaki spoke to Just Dubai magazine.
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