jordan pulse -

AMMAN — Jordan has joined the newly established Middle East Collaborative for Undiagnosed Diseases (MECUD), following the publication of a landmark paper titled “A Middle East Collaborative for Undiagnosed Diseases” in Nature Reviews Genetics.
The initiative in Jordan is led by Dr. Issa Abu-Dayyeh, Head of Research and Development at Biolab Diagnostic Laboratory, in collaboration with Prof. Ahmad Abou Tayoun, Professor of Genetics at Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences and Director of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Dubai Health, alongside participating institutions across the MECUD network.
MECUD aims to connect patients and families suffering from conditions that remain undiagnosed despite prior medical evaluations with a regional network of clinicians, geneticists, and specialized laboratories. Biolab Diagnostic Laboratory will serve as the official reference center for the project in Jordan, tasked with receiving candidate cases, documenting clinical phenotypes, collecting biological samples, and coordinating advanced genetic, molecular, or functional testing with network partners.
In addition to resolving individual diagnostic queries, the initiative focuses on discovering novel gene-disease associations, refining genetic variant interpretation, and building comprehensive genomic databases representative of Middle Eastern populations.
The program accepts pediatric and adult cases presenting with suspected genetic or molecular etiologies where a unified diagnosis has not been established. Selection criteria prioritize patients with prior negative or inconclusive genetic testing, families with multiple affected individuals, cases involving consanguinity, and unrecognized or atypical clinical syndromes.
Dr. Issa Abu-Dayyeh noted that behind every undiagnosed case is a patient and a family seeking answers, stating that the MECUD project provides a structured clinical pathway to document Jordanian cases accurately and link them to regional and international technological resources.
Dr. Amid Abdelnour, Founder and CEO of Biolab Diagnostic Laboratory, affirmed that Biolab’s involvement aligns with its strategy to advance laboratory medicine by leveraging information technology and artificial intelligence to process, analyze, and integrate clinical data with molecular and genetic metrics, thereby driving precision medicine.
Biolab Diagnostic Laboratory operates 28 branches across the Kingdom, offering over 700 diagnostic tests. The facility holds international accreditations from the College of American Pathologists (CAP), Joint Commission International (JCI), ISO 15189, and the Health Care Accreditation Council (HCAC), alongside ISO 27001 certification for information security management.