A New Generation of Arab Innovation

A test for hepatitis C. Skin-care products made from camel’s milk. A monitor that measures a swimmer’s heart beat.

They are all the work of a new crop of Arab researchers, inventors who have persevered against long odds to make their ideas a reality.

The innovations are emerging from a region with a rich scientific heritage: During the Middle Ages, the Arab world made significant discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. But in modern times it has fallen behind. A 2010 Unesco report described scientific research in the region as being in a “vegetative state.”

The Arab world as a whole is behind the United States and even developing economies like Brazil in the production of scientific papers and patents. For decades, investment in research and development by most governments was anemic. The authoritarian regimes, social upheaval, and conflicts that have plagued the region have slowed development of an environment conducive to innovation.

But today in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and other Arab countries, governments and universities are taking steps to spur scientific innovation, dedicating more funds to research and building links between academe and industry.

The researchers behind the hepatitis-C test and other new products are benefiting from such links. Yet their success has depended just as much on personal tenacity and support from outside their homelands, including from the United States. Their efforts may serve as models to others; but higher education in the region has a way to go before a renaissance in Arab innovation is possible.

“There are a few successes on an individual level,” says Issa Batarseh, president of Jordan’s Princess Sumaya University for Technology. “But as institutions, we haven’t done that well.”

When Hassan Azzazy, a chemistry professor, left the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine in 2003 for a job at the American University in Cairo, he knew he would face an uphill battle in fostering scientific breakthroughs that have practical applications.

At most Egyptian universities, money is so tight that “research is framed to make use of existing resources rather than to explore new questions,” says Mr. Azzazy, who left Egypt as a young man to pursue graduate studies in the United States. “No one is interested in investigating solutions to societal problems"—such as the significant health and environmental issues that the country faces.

Even at the American University in Cairo, a private university that is considered one of the country’s best, research capabilities were limited. Mr. Azzazy’s lab was a few feet of counter space in a teaching lab.

He set about developing the chemistry department’s research capacity, finding outside funds for his research and persuading the administration to establish graduate programs in biotechnology and chemistry. He also began teaching a graduate course in “bio-entrepreneurship.” But by 2010, after he had taught the class for three years, none of his students had gone on to create businesses.

“So I decided to start my own company,” he says. With funds from new foundations established in the Persian Gulf, such as the Arab Science and Technology Foundation, he took a one-year sabbatical and focused on developing prototypes for affordable medical diagnostic and therapeutic devices.

Mr. Azzazy and his research team asked themselves: “What is the worst medical problem in Egypt?” Their answer was hepatitis C. Because of a botched schistosomiasis-immunization campaign in the 1960s, in which needles weren’t sterilized properly, hepatitis C infects an estimated 15 percent of Egyptians. The disease doesn’t always present symptoms, so can it go undetected for years; the test for it is expensive for many Egyptians. More than a hundred thousand new cases appear each year.

The new test, which relies on gold nanoparticles that change color on contact with the virus, could be on the market in a year. It should cost about $8, a tenth of the cost of the two-step test currently available.

Establishing a start-up company to commercialize his breakthrough has been “a big, long journey,” says Mr. Azzazy. He had to persuade his university’s administration to create the infrastructure to support his project. It took the American University in Cairo nearly two years to figure out the legal and logistical framework to create the spinoff, something no one at the university—and, its administration says, no one anywhere else in Egypt—had done before.

In 2013, Mr. Azzazy finally incorporated his company, D-Kimia, and raised about $500,000 from private investors. D-Kimia now is developing tests for other diseases, including tuberculosis and bladder cancer.

The American University in Cairo’s technology-transfer office, which was created in 2010, requests 50 percent of royalties on any product developed by professors and has filed eight patents based on Mr. Azzazy’s work; D-Kimia is developing three of them, he says.

Aside from improving Egyptians’ health, Mr. Azzazy views job creation as the other main purpose of his research. He gets visibly agitated at the thought of all the students who emerge from universities in Egypt every year with a diploma and no job prospects.

“As an educator, I owe it to my students to empower them to earn a living,” he says.

Mr. Azzazy isn’t the only one who sees scientific research as the key to economic growth and to solving the region’s spiraling rate of youth unemployment, which is one of the highest in the world and a leading cause of political unrest here.

In the Persian Gulf, oil- and gas-rich emirates are looking to diversify their economies by financing ambitious science and technology ventures. Egypt and most other Arab countries don’t have the resources to follow that model, but in the past few years, many have pledged modest increases in research funds. Egypt’s new constitution sets a goal of allocating 1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to scientific research, up from 0.4 percent in 2010-11.

Jordan, a small nation with few natural resources, has pledged to spend 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product on research and technology by 2015. (For comparison, the United States allocates about 2.8 percent of its GDP to research and development.) Jordan has created research centers at universities, established government offices to support technology transfer, and created programs linking investors with start-ups.

Thanks in part to those efforts, a new line of skin-care products, Skinue, will be available for sale in the United States this year. The brightly colored little tubes have an unusual origin. One of the key ingredients is camel’s milk, from animals housed at the royal stables in the emirate of Dubai. The milk is freeze-dried and flown to a lab in Jordan.

Another key ingredient in Skinue is the determination of Penelope Shihab—a Jordanian businesswoman, mother of four, and Ph.D. student in medical diagnostics at the University of Cambridge. In 2005, when she helped create Monojo, the company behind the skin-care line and one of Jordan’s first biotech start-ups, “talking about biotech was like talking Chinese,” she says.

“Investors are looking for short-term returns and consider these kinds of enterprise very risky,” Ms. Shihab says. “We don’t have a good relationship between businessmen and scientists. They don’t trust each other.”

Her plan, to study antibody production with the goal of developing ways to diagnose tumors, got support from Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society and Higher Council for Science and Technology, as well as from international agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development. Half a dozen public and private Jordanian universities have also invested, contributing about a quarter of the company’s initial funds and providing access to their labs and consultations with their scientists, says Ms. Shihab. But the company discovered that it faced stiff competition from pharmaceutical multinationals. It was time to go back to the drawing board.

That’s when scientists suggested investigating the properties of camel’s milk, a staple of the Bedouin diet renowned for its health benefits. They discovered that the milk has particularly stable proteins with antimicrobial properties. These are ideal for acne treatments, says Ms. Shihab; Monojo’s researchers also hope they will have other applications, for example to treat gastroenteritis.

Despite a more conducive environment for start-ups in recent years in Jordan, Ms. Shihab needed to travel overseas to get access to the know-how and lab facilities to move her project forward. Following the advice of a Jordanian investor who had studied in Missouri, she ended up at the University of Missouri’s Life Science Business Incubator. The university program, in Columbia, Mo., opened in 2009 with the goal of attracting technology ventures to the area. The collaboration gave Ms. Shihab access to labs and medical researchers, as well as advice on marketing. During her time there, she established an American subsidiary, Columbia Biotech.

Most of the research and development still takes place in Jordan, however, and Ms. Shihab says she wants to prove that biotechnology can be pursued in her homeland. “You have good brains, and you have young people,” she says.

But often students from even top science universities are unprepared to pursue new research in an entrepreneurial way. They “know the info but don’t have the practical or scientific problem-solving skills,” says Luay Abu-Qatouseh, training manager and microbiology section head at Monojo. “If you give them an exam, they’ll answer the questions,” he says, but they don’t know how to apply their knowledge.

It’s a common complaint across the region and one that universities are just starting to do more about.

Hind Hobeika, a 26-year-old graduate of the American University of Beirut, says she could have benefited from such practical knowledge. When she was studying at the university, she says, “I don’t think I knew what entrepreneurship was; there were no start-ups.”

In 2009 professors at her university encouraged students in the mechanical-engineering program to apply to Stars of Science, a reality television show and science competition sponsored by the emirate of Qatar. Ms. Hobeika was an undergraduate in the engineering program and a member of the university’s swim team. She had always been bothered by having to manually monitor her pulse while swimming laps (knowing their heart rates helps swimmers pace themselves). She applied to the TV show with a proposal for a device that could be attached to a swimmer’s goggles and measure the heartbeat through her temple; a small light in the swimmer’s field of vision would tell her whether she was beneath or above a target heart rate.

That spring, after a month of practically no sleep while designing her prototype in labs in Qatar, Ms. Hobeika finished in third place, winning $100,000 for her invention, which she christened Instabeat.

“It was life-changing,” she says. “Before that, my aspiration was to contribute to a big company. After that, I saw I was able to have my own thing.” Still, it took a year for her to figure out her next step. “Some investors called me right away, but I didn’t understand what these people wanted. I was 21—it took me time to process.”

Today Ms. Hobeika’s company has offices in Beirut as well as in Oregon and California, where she had to go to find engineers capable of fine-tuning her design. Juggling the time difference is one of the challenges she faces; another is convincing people in Lebanon that such a young woman leads an actual company.

Nothing in her education prepared her for running her own business, says Ms. Hobeika. “Sometimes it’s hard to make a real-life connection between what you’re studying and how to apply it in your industry—to see the value,” she says.

“There’s a lot of innovation that goes on in the region,” says Imad H. Elhajj, an associate professor of engineering at Ms. Hobeika’s alma mater, but “we don’t have the culture or the support to move from idea to prototype to something that can be commercialized.”

The American University of Beirut is trying to do more support technology transfer, says Fadia Homeidan, director of its office of grants and contracts. “We’re behind Europe and the States in this,” she says, but “the thinking at the university has changed in the last five years. We see the importance of applied research, having start-ups, royalty generation.”

Even as universities try to help researchers and students create new ideas to bring to market, the region’s political unrest presents a major challenge. Instability dampens investment and economic growth; repression hinders the free flow of ideas.

Yet young Arab innovators seem prepared to take disadvantages and disruptions in stride.

Last fall a stream of curious visitors scuttled through an opening in a barbed-wire fence and walked past walls covered in graffiti and bullet holes to reach a building just off Tahrir Square, in central Cairo. They were headed to the improbable opening of a new technology park.

The American University in Cairo has leased this set of buildings surrounding a large open courtyard, part of its old downtown campus, to technology developers. It is located in the middle of a turbulent neighborhood that still witnesses regular protests and clashes.

But young, optimistic entrepreneurs ignored the chaos outside and focused on promoting their projects, such as websites to coordinate carpooling and companies that cover rooftops in greenery or solar panels.

“The ecosystem has been growing,” says Abdelhameed Sharara, one of the event’s organizers, despite the uncertainty and violence in Egypt over last three years. “There are things we want to change, regardless of politics.”

Ahmed El Alfi, the investor behind the new tech park, echoes such optimism. Like the innovative ideas coming from Mr. Azzazy, Ms. Shihab, and Ms. Hobeika, he sees small but significant signs of change.

“We are like little green shoots,” Mr. El Alfi says, “sprouting from the concrete.”