The world is on the brink of one of the most astonishing breakthroughs in the history of medicine and Saudi Arabia is front and center.

The National Biotechnology Strategy lays out what we are building: vaccines researched and manufactured domestically, serving both the Kingdom and our region; medicines, biologics and biosimilars produced locally, ensuring no patient ever waits on an overseas supply chain; a national genome program enabling precision diagnostics and targeted therapies; and climate-resilient crops engineered so that we can sustainably nourish our population in a hotter, drier world. By 2040, this strategy will contribute more than $34 billion to our non-oil gross domestic product.

But strategies must be translated into treatments, companies and clinics.

That means we must connect laboratory discovery with sustained investment and align domestic ambition with global execution.

The architects of the modern life sciences economy are in the Kingdom this week for the Riyadh Global Medical Biotechnology Summit. They include: Flagship Pioneering, whose venture model gave the world Moderna; Novo Holdings, managing some $100 billion and among the world’s most successful dedicated life sciences investors; and WuXi AppTec, whose research and manufacturing platform sits behind a large share of the medicines the world takes every day.

Why is it so important to convene such a powerful group? Because the frontier of biotechnology is no longer purely biological. It is computational. The biotechs of this decade are fundamentally data enterprises. Moderna calls messenger RNA “the software of life,” defining itself as a digital-first platform powered by cloud infrastructure, analytics and artificial intelligence.

We must connect laboratory discovery with sustained investment and align domestic ambition with global execution.

Saudi Arabia is in a position of real strength. We have the data, the committed leadership and the compute: gigawatt-scale data centers, rapid access to the best chips and the domestic energy to power them at a scale very few nations can match. Add the most rapid social transformation of any nation on Earth, with Saudi women entering laboratories, hospitals and boardrooms in numbers unimaginable a decade ago, and you have a country primed to translate science into sovereign scale.

In human terms, for Saudi families, this will have a huge impact on quality of life. Two decades ago, the Kingdom made premarital screening for sickle cell disease and thalassemia universal; within six years, the number of at-risk marriages fell by 60 percent. That is biotechnology turned into lifesaving policy, measured directly in children born healthy. Today, King Faisal Specialist Hospital manufactures CAR-T cells in Riyadh, cutting the cost of a lifesaving cancer therapy by 80 percent and bringing it within reach of hundreds more patients. Our strategy commits us to adding five years to average life expectancy by 2040. That is five more years with parents, with grandchildren, with the people we love.

We are also looking outward. The Lancet calculates that vaccines have saved 154 million lives over the past 50 years. Every vaccine manufactured in the Kingdom, and every genome decoded here, adds to that tally for humanity.

No nation builds this alone. It requires capital, ideas and durable alliances, and that is the mandate of the Future Investment Initiative Institute. It is why we are proud strategic partners of this summit and why, next month in Riyadh, at FII10, we will convene the world’s foremost investors, scientists and decision-makers to explore an era in which AI is already decoding the genome in real time and how to make preventive healthcare investable at scale.

That is the power of convening: turning conversations into partnerships and partnerships into companies, clinics and cures.

Technology exists to serve humanity. I will use every opportunity available to connect Saudi science and capital with the world, so that the breakthroughs of this decade lift the quality of life of every citizen of our Kingdom and of communities across the globe. We are privileged to live through this historic moment. Let us build it together.

— Princess Dr. Maha Al-Saud is CEO of the Future Investment Initiative.