Hossam Haick has spent two decades building sensors that can detect disease before symptoms appear. The Technion professor expects his latest innovation—a skin patch costing a few dozen dollars—to reach patients within two or three years. It’s an ambition rooted in something more personal than profit.
Twenty years ago, Haick received a Marie Curie grant worth 1.73 million euros. He used it to build a laboratory with 17 students and researchers instead of two. Today, that lab has generated nearly 100 registered patents and is conducting large trials involving tens of thousands of people across multiple continents. But the project that matters most to him emerged from a taxi ride through a poor neighborhood near Mumbai’s airport—a moment that forced him to ask whether breakthrough medicine could actually reach the people who need it most.
From Breath to Skin: A Different Kind of Innovation
Haick, 51, is a professor of chemical engineering and nanotechnology at the Technion who grew up in Nazareth in a Christian family. His father died of lung cancer a year before a recent interview, but he’d spent decades working as a teacher and studying in the evenings without institutional support. That history shaped Haick’s approach to science: he believes excellence and accessibility aren’t opposing values.
His breakthrough came from studying volatile organic compounds—VOCs—in exhaled breath. The idea was simple: diseases produce distinct molecular mixtures that sensors sensitive enough to catch them could, in theory, detect. After a university friend developed leukemia, Haick decided to focus on cancer and early diagnosis. Working with Prof. Silke Christiansen, a physicist at the Free University of Berlin, starting 17 years ago, his team developed an electronic nose—a portable device combining sensors and artificial intelligence to analyze breath for disease markers.
The device is now about the size of a hand and roughly 88% accurate, comparable to and in some settings better than standard imaging. It can identify 17 diseases and has received Breakthrough Device designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for lung cancer and advanced liver fibrosis unrelated to alcohol consumption. Studies have found it can identify lung cancer early, sometimes before symptoms appear. But the electronic nose required electricity, medical infrastructure and trained operators—all barriers to use in the poorest parts of the world.
Then came the skin patch. A four-centimeter-by-four-centimeter version contains electrical circuits and six sensors that pick up substances released by skin and send data to a phone app. The patch continuously compares readings with statistical databases and sends alerts if it detects a shift toward illness. Walaa Saliba, a laboratory engineer, helped develop a polymer patch that can repair cuts or scratches automatically through reconnected chemical bonds—without heat or external stimulus—in about 30 seconds.
Testing at Scale, With a Gates-Backed Mandate
The first disease the patch diagnosed was tuberculosis. With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the patch was tested on approximately 2,000 people in India, South Africa and Latvia, achieving roughly 90% accuracy in detecting active tuberculosis compared with a control group. It achieved similar results for latent tuberculosis, which has no symptoms but can develop into active disease. Haick said the patch costs a little over a dollar to manufacture and works for months, though it needs testing in real-world conditions to demonstrate reliable disease identification.
Gates took a personal interest in the project because it was easy to use and inexpensive. Haick had initially promised a $1 manufacturing cost; the tuberculosis version now costs $1.50. The economics matter because tuberculosis kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, concentrated in low-income countries where diagnosis remains delayed and difficult.
Haick is now conducting large trials involving tens of thousands of people to identify chemical signatures of malaria, COVID-19, degenerative and infectious diseases, and several cancers. One lung cancer trial involves 5,600 participants and 20 partners with a 14.8 million-euro grant. A schizophrenia consortium has 3,700 participants, 18 partners and an 8 million-euro budget; researchers will monitor people experiencing psychosis for a year and a half to three years to identify early signs. He recently received another 8 million-euro grant to study Parkinson’s, involving 6,000 participants and 20 partners. The researchers will monitor people at risk, including farmers exposed to pesticides over long periods, using a two-sided patch that monitors the body on one side and the environment on the other.
Commercial use of patches for lung cancer, tuberculosis and hormonal changes in women could begin within a few years, though full clinical validation, regulation, industrial production and market introduction will take longer. Haick said his goal is “personalized, precise, noninvasive medicine,” with diagnosis tailored to individuals and their environments. He envisions a patch that could eventually deliver tailored drugs through a small cartridge, with animal experiments testing the principle already producing promising initial results.
The Broader Regional Science Agenda
Across the region, other initiatives are reshaping how technology addresses human health. Last month, during talks at the United Nations General Assembly, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, identified as UAE deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, announced with Prime Minister Nawaf Salam a “One Million Lebanese AI Experts” initiative designed to familiarize up to one million Lebanese with generative AI. Minister of the Displaced and Minister of State for Technology Affairs Kamal Sehahdeh provided details about the still-developing project, which builds on a Lebanese strategy developed over nearly a year. The initiative plans general training sessions lasting three hours and organized in four modules, covering fundamental and practical generative-AI and prompt skills. The digital rights advocacy group SMEX has raised concerns about the initiative, though specific details remain limited as the project continues to develop.
In Abu Dhabi, Insilico Medicine researchers have developed LongevityBench, a benchmark for assessing AI reasoning across biological data related to aging. The work, published last month in Cell, includes specialized models called Longevity-LLMs and the Longevity Claw research system. The benchmark covers 17 tasks across clinical, epigenetic, transcriptomic, proteomic and genetic data, using measurable outcomes such as biological age from DNA methylation, tissue age from transcriptomic data and chronological age from proteomic profiles.
Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, evaluated systems from six AI developer teams: OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, alongside five specialized Longevity-LLMs. The specialized models matched or exceeded most of the frontier systems. A specialized model outperformed the best tested frontier system on DNA-methylation age comparison, while a 0.6-billion-parameter model substantially reduced mean absolute error on a proteomic age-prediction task compared with the best general-purpose system. “This is the finding I find most important, and it goes against the prevailing assumption in AI that bigger always wins,” Zhavoronkov told Arab News. “Scaling general intelligence gets you fluency. It does not automatically get you scientific competence in data-dense domain like aging biology.”
The Abu Dhabi center has grown to around 60 AI engineers, computational biologists and chemists and contributes to drug-discovery programs. Insilico is separately collaborating with Saudi Aramco and academic partners, including King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, on generative AI for materials research, working on metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture and hydrogen storage alongside the University of Montpellier.
Rising Tide: Technion’s Regional Reach
Back at the Technion, Haick’s own trajectory reflects broader shifts. As an Arab Israeli scientist, he received threats and harassment a decade ago because he was “an Arab working on sensors, a technology that can be used in missiles.” He said airport staff repeatedly humiliated him at Ben-Gurion Airport before he eventually received a fast-track passport control certificate from the Israel Airports Authority. During the Gaza war, while serving as dean, he moved some exams to the Technion’s Tel Aviv campus because of missile fire on the north and received threats to his life.
Yet his contributions to the institution and his field have been recognized internationally. Last July, President Isaac Herzog called to say Haick would receive the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor. He’s also been elected a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors and received the Order of Academic Palms from the French government.
As dean of undergraduate studies across two terms, Haick oversaw several thousand students and introduced an annual student art exhibition. He established 12 committees to change stages of the degree process. One new admissions route allows applicants to enroll with a high school matriculation certificate, including those with low grades; their continuation depends on first-semester performance. Of about 200 students admitted through the route each year, about a quarter meet the requirements and continue, with average grades higher than those of students admitted through the regular route. Each receives a mentor throughout their degree, and some take a summer program focused on speaking and listening to Hebrew.
According to a Nature article Haick co-authored 6 years ago, since 22 years ago the number of Arab students at the Technion had risen by 200%, Arab women students by 350% and outstanding Arab students by 1,800%, while the dropout rate fell by 67%. Haick served as assistant to the Technion’s senior vice president, responsible for equal opportunities. He said he opposed affirmative action, instead believing in investing in staff and support to help students succeed. “I believe in excellence, and advancement on that basis alone,” he said.
Over the previous five years, Technion researchers won six grants to lead consortia, three headed by Haick; Israel Innovation Authority figures showed Israeli researchers received 58 such grants in total over that period. Before then, Haick led five other successful consortia studying colorectal cancer, melanoma and lung diseases, among other conditions. Applications had a success rate of 2% to 3%. His goal remains clear: make diagnosis and treatment accessible to those who need it most, regardless of geography or income.
Why This Matters:
The skin patch offers a practical answer to a persistent global inequity: breakthrough medical technology remains concentrated in wealthy countries with strong healthcare infrastructure. Haick’s work—like the broader AI initiatives emerging across the Middle East—shows that innovation isn’t inherently tied to developed-world economies. Yet the gap between invention and implementation remains vast. A tuberculosis detection tool costing $1.50 to manufacture means nothing if distribution systems, regulatory pathways and healthcare access remain fragmented. The Lebanon AI initiative aims to democratize skills, but its success depends on whether training translates to actual economic opportunity for participants. The Abu Dhabi longevity research shows that specialized AI models can outperform general-purpose systems—a finding that challenges dominant assumptions about scaling—but it also draws attention to how narrow the current focus on aging biology remains globally. These innovations matter because they’re attempting to address real human suffering: tuberculosis, cancer, degenerative diseases that disproportionately affect low-income populations. They matter because they’re happening outside traditional innovation hubs, suggesting that scientific capacity is more distributed than conventional narratives acknowledge. And they matter because they reveal both the promise and the limits of technology-driven solutions—brilliant scientific work still requires funding, regulatory approval, supply chains and political will to reach the populations that need it most.