A very personal partnership  

Steve Gardner reflects on the family experiences behind a new partnership between Re:Cognition Health and M42 

I’ve been lucky enough in my career to interview and chair panels with some inspiring people from all over the healthcare world.  But never did it feel more personal than in April 2025, when I took to the stage at Abu Dhabi Global Health Week, now the Future Health Summit, to interview Dr Emer MacSweeney from Re:Cognition Health and Dr Laila Abdel Wareth from M42. 

The conversation had begun through our online Healthcare World Series, before we brought it onto the stage in Abu Dhabi.  But knowing the experiences Laila and I shared, I knew this one would feel very different in person. Nor did I envisage the far-reaching consequences of that discussion for both organisations, or the role that we at Healthcare World would play in helping to create a momentous partnership. 

As I sat in the audience 18 months later, in the same hall at the now rebranded Future Health Summit, watching Laila and Emer sign the agreement to bring specialist brain and memory care to patients in the UAE, I couldn’t help but reflect on how sometimes our darkest moments can have surprisingly hopeful outcomes. 

In 202? I lost my mother to Alzheimer’s disease. 

In reality, we lost her a couple of years before that, as she slowly slipped away from us into a haze of lost memories and forgotten friends and loved ones.  At the end, she barely recognised even my father, a man she’d spent more than 60 years with, and then only occasionally. 

I knew as I mounted the stage that Laila had lost her father under similarly traumatic circumstances, and that this would be an emotional but fascinating experience. 

Joining us that day was Emer, a leading brain expert and co-founder of Re:Cognition Health, and our conversation would explore medical advances that provide hope for millions of people facing the same experiences Laila and I had been through with our parents. 

Emer and Re:Cognition Health are at the forefront of bringing new Alzheimer’s treatments to patients.  These include Eli Lilly’s donanemab, which targets amyloid plaques in the brain and can slow cognitive and functional decline in eligible people with early Alzheimer’s disease. 

With the support of Laila’s diagnostic expertise, we discussed the possibility of identifying changes associated with Alzheimer’s much earlier, potentially while people are still in their 50s, and the opportunities earlier diagnosis could create. 

The hope was that testing would become more accessible and that, as treatments and research progressed, more families might be spared some of the experiences we had been through.   We are not yet at the point where a positive test means treatment can prevent someone developing symptoms, but the prospect of being able to intervene earlier gave that conversation a very personal significance.  And as I dedicated the session to the memory of my mother and Laila’s father, I couldn’t have envisaged how far that conversation would take us. 

Healthcare World worked with both M42 and Re:Cognition Health over the next 18 months to help facilitate discussions about bringing Re:Cognition Health’s specialist brain and mind services to the UAE.  Those discussions developed into a partnership with M42’s Mubadala Health Dubai, based at Sunset Mall, and Tawam Molecular Imaging Centre in Al Ain, connecting specialist clinical care with the diagnostic facilities needed to support it. 

The first phase of the service has now launched in Dubai, with Al Ain to follow, and we at Healthcare World are really proud to have played a key role.  Sitting in that audience watching the ceremony, it was lovely to have our role acknowledged from the stage. I think my mum would have been proud. 

Thanks, Mum.  And thanks to Laila and Emer.  More than just clients, true friends. 

If you would like to explore how Healthcare World can help create partnerships for you, as we did for Emer and Laila, email louise@healthcareworld.com.