Dr Abdulrazaq S. Al-Jazairi, Director of Clinical Trial Transformation at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, has spent more than 30 years at the institution. Trained as a cardiology clinical pharmacist, with a doctorate from North Carolina, general residency at Duke University, and cardiovascular pharmacotherapy at Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, and a master’s in pharmaceutical business administration, he combines clinical expertise with strategic insight. Over the past five years, he has led the development of a comprehensive clinical trials ecosystem, helping position both the hospital and Saudi Arabia as a credible hub for global research, rare diseases and advanced therapeutics.
You have spent your entire career at King Faisal Specialist Hospital. Could you briefly introduce yourself and outline your current role and responsibilities?
I was born and raised in the holy city of Mecca and have had only one employer since graduating from pharmacy school: King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, Riyadh. My clinical background is in cardiology pharmacy. I completed my Doctor of Pharmacy degree in North Carolina and my residency at Duke University Medical Centre, where I had the opportunity to work alongside the Duke Clinical Research Institute during its formative years – an experience that proved formative for my own thinking about clinical research infrastructure. I subsequently completed a cardiology specialisation at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, with my practice site at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Upon returning to Saudi Arabia in 2001, I began building my career at King Faisal across a range of clinical and administrative roles, including hospital-level formulary management and, eventually, the director of pharmacy. In that role, the challenge was always to serve patients with the most clinically effective and cutting-edge therapies while managing the considerable budget pressures that accompany them.
In 2010 I chose to deepen my understanding of the industry side of the equation by pursuing a master’s degree in pharmaceutical business. After 14 years of clinical practice, I wanted to understand how decisions are made by the people sitting on the other side of the table – the marketing strategies, the budget frameworks, and the leadership dynamics. That perspective has informed everything I have done since. Over the past several years, as precision medicine, cell and gene therapy, and advanced therapeutic medicinal products have moved from aspiration to clinical reality, the leadership at King Faisal recognised that we needed to build a serious infrastructure covering regulatory, legal, IT, data sharing, supply chain and cyber security aspects to support clinical trials and research at scale. That is the role I now occupy as Director of Clinical Trial Transformation Division.
You began building a holistic clinical trials infrastructure around five years ago. Where does the programme stand today, and how would you describe the current portfolio?
Saudi-FDA plays a crucial role in clinical trials regulation. We have been fortunate in that, as we developed our division internally, a number of supportive external entities were being established in parallel by the government. These include the Saudi National Institutes of Health, modelled on its US counterpart, and the Research, Development and Innovation Authority, which focuses specifically on innovation and supports the pathway from early discovery through to investigational new drug submission and first-in-human clinical trials. We have also worked closely with the National Insurance Council to develop national policy on including patients in clinical trials under the national insurance framework, and with the Saudi Authority for Data and Artificial Intelligence on data sharing and cyber security – particularly in the context of rare diseases and genomics, where data governance is especially consequential. A national genomics data sharing policy was finalised through that process and has been in effect for several months.
Our division serves as the gateway between King Faisal and this broader external ecosystem, ensuring our internal systems and processes are fully aligned with the regulatory and policy environment as it evolves, and with the Vision 2030 objectives for clinical research and innovation.
In terms of scale: King Faisal currently accounts for more than 55 percent of all clinical trials conducted in Saudi Arabia. At any given point in time, we have approximately 170 clinical trials open for recruitment – a figure that reflects where we closed out 2025. Notably, between 25 and 30 percent of those trials involve advanced therapeutic medicinal products, including cell and gene therapies. We are currently the only centre in Saudi Arabia licensed by the relevant authorities to produce CAR-T cell therapies in-house. Our target is to have 1,000 active clinical trials at any point in time by 2030.
Rare diseases and genomics are a key focus. How does Saudi Arabia’s unique genetic landscape shape your work, and how important is a national genomic data repository?
Rare diseases have been central to King Faisal’s identity since the hospital’s inception. We have been the primary referral centre for rare disease diagnosis and management across the Kingdom and the Gulf Cooperation Council for decades. The cultural dimension is significant: consanguineous marriages within extended families have historically contributed to a higher prevalence of certain inherited genetic conditions in the Saudi population, which has made this a particularly important area of clinical focus. Premarital screening programmes have been a major public health effort to address this, and new-born screening is an increasingly important frontier.
Our Centre of Genomic Medicine is now a mature and sophisticated operation. It was built largely through the efforts of colleagues who established our genetic disease repository and has been responsible for much of the foundational research and publishing in this area, and who now leads the Saudi Human Genome Project – a national initiative to characterise inherited genetic diseases across the Saudi population. Our genomic laboratory is accredited, highly sophisticated, and has expanded beyond genomics into multi-omics for precision medicine. Pharmacogenomic sequencing has been part of our standard of care for two years, fully integrated with our electronic health record system. Since the hospital has operated on a paperless electronic health record since the early 2000s, we have more than two decades of structured longitudinal patient data – an asset of considerable value for research, and particularly for constructing robust control groups in gene therapy interventions.
King Faisal is developing its own GMP manufacturing facility. Can you update us on progress and explain its strategic importance?
The GMP-compliant facility is one of the most consequential investments we are making, and it deserves some context. The impetus came partly from our early experience with CAR-T cell therapy – we understood that if we could not manufacture these products ourselves, the cost and logistical barriers would make them inaccessible to the vast majority of patients who needed them. A therapy priced at multi- million USD per patient is simply not deployable at scale within our system without a fundamentally different model for access.
The facility has received generous government funding and construction is underway. In the interim, we are looking for leveraging mobile GMP units to maintain and advance our manufacturing and research activities. The permanent facility – which will have 16 modular, scalable cleanrooms, making it larger than any comparable facility currently operational – is expected to be fully operational by 2030. It is designed not only for clinical production but as a cornerstone of what will become a genuine biotech city in the region, where the facility will serve broader biotechnology manufacturing and commercialisation purposes.
Alongside the physical infrastructure, we have developed a value-based framework to address the cost challenge more systematically. Rather than paying the full list price for high-cost therapies upfront, we have structured reimbursement agreements with industry partners that are contingent on patients achieving defined clinical outcomes. We pay for results, not for prescriptions. This model is not only fiscally prudent – it is the only sustainable approach to deploying these therapies within a budget-constrained government healthcare system. We are now working with regulatory and pricing authorities, and with our counterparts across the GCC, to refine and scale this outcomes-based framework. Our electronic health record infrastructure makes it operationally feasible: capturing the clinical endpoints required to trigger or withhold reimbursement is entirely manageable within our existing systems. The financial model and the clinical model, in my view, cannot be separated. They must be designed together.
Looking ahead, what are the next steps in this journey toward making Saudi Arabia a genuine hub for research and innovation in rare diseases and advanced therapeutics?
The next phase is about integration across the full value chain – from basic science discovery through translational research, clinical trials, real-world evidence generation, and feeding findings back into new discovery cycles. For too long, these components have operated in relative isolation. Our focus now is on connecting them deliberately and systematically.
Saudi Arabia’s 2040 Biotechnology Strategy articulates this vision clearly, with research and development, genomic data and discovery, and innovation as its central pillars. My own work sits at the intersection of intellectual property mobilisation and translational clinical practice – taking what is being generated in our basic science laboratories and our animal research facility, which is among the best in the region, and moving it through the pipeline toward clinical application and ultimately toward commercialisation as Saudi-developed, Saudi-manufactured innovations.
The GMP-compliant facility is the physical embodiment of that ambition. Resourced appropriately and activated through partnerships with the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, with principal investigators locally and internationally, and integrated into the emerging biotech city concept, it has the potential to anchor a genuine innovation ecosystem – one that does not merely adopt therapies developed elsewhere, but contributes its own discoveries to the global scientific community. That is what we are building toward, and I believe the foundations are now firmly in place.
What is your message to pharmaceutical and biotech companies considering Saudi Arabia as an R&D partner?
Saudi Arabia’s ambition is clearly articulated in Vision 2030 and the 2040 Biotechnology Strategy, and the milestones being achieved on the ground are real and verifiable. Our clinical trial KPIs are published and independently tracked. The ecosystem – regulatory, governmental, institutional, and increasingly commercial – is functioning and maturing rapidly. KFSH&RC is not working in isolation: we operate within a broader national framework that spans healthcare, technology, investment, and talent development, which makes the environment genuinely attractive for partners who are thinking seriously about the region.
For industries in rare diseases, genomics, and advanced therapeutics in particular, the combination of a large and genetically distinctive patient population, a sophisticated genomic and clinical data infrastructure, in-house GMP-compliant manufacturing capability, and a results-oriented outcomes-based reimbursement framework represents a compelling and differentiated proposition. We are not at the beginning of this journey – we are well into it, and we are moving fast.
