Science is "churning out magic day after day" — yet most of it never reaches the patients who need it most. Closing that gap will anchor the 8th World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), which convenes in Doha on November 29 and 30 under the theme 'The New Health Span'.
Qatar Foundation's flagship health-policy platform will train five tracks on the forces reshaping medicine: longevity and healthy ageing, the future of fertility, financing breakthrough therapies, artificial intelligence in human-centred health, and global health diplomacy, Dr Sunoor Verma, WISH director of partnerships and outreach, told Gulf Times in an exclusive interview.
Held at the Qatar National Convention Centre, the summit is among the leading global platforms for health policy, drawing policymakers, researchers and clinicians to confront the sector's sharpest emerging challenges and opportunities.
That mismatch — between what laboratories can do and what populations actually receive — is the problem WISH was built to solve. "A lot of innovation is happening around health globally, but not much of it actually gets implemented," Verma said, pointing in particular to the divide between the Global North, where advances tend to emerge, and the Global South, where they are slow to arrive.
Founded in 2012 under the vision of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, WISH has spent 14 years trying to bridge that gap, commissioning roughly 70 policy reports and convening international organisations around evidence-based solutions. What sets the work apart, Verma said, is its deliberate focus on the overlooked: "issues and perspectives that are either under the radar, underappreciated or underfunded globally yet have a very significant impact." The reports, he stressed, are designed to move policy, not merely to spark debate.
Each of the five tracks will be examined in detail by leading specialists. The fertility track will weigh declining birth rates against treatment options, ethical questions and the growing commercialisation of fertility care. The breakthrough-therapies track tackles what Verma called one of modern medicine's greatest challenges: making cutting-edge treatment affordable rather than the preserve of those who can pay millions.
"Science is churning out magic day after day. We see this in the labs of Sidra Medicine, Hamad Medical Corporation, the universities in Education City," he said. "The challenge is ensuring they reach patients rather than remaining available only to those who can afford millions of dollars in treatment."
Artificial intelligence, he argued, can no longer be filed under the future. "In many policy circles we continue to talk about AI as if it is coming, but it is already here," Verma said, citing AI-driven hospitals, robotic physiotherapy systems and diagnostic tools already in operation across several countries.
The unresolved questions, he said, are ones of ownership, bias and accountability. Current systems are trained largely on data from wealthier Western populations, raising doubts about how well they translate to other patient groups. "Who owns the data and who governs it are fundamental questions," he said — and when a patient acts on AI-generated advice and comes to harm, it is far from settled who bears responsibility. Governments, he added, will need smart regulatory frameworks that protect patients without smothering innovation.
The summit's fifth track, global health diplomacy, turns to the fraying of international co-operation at a moment of complex health emergencies. With multilateral institutions under strain and states increasingly striking bilateral deals, Verma said the central question is what comes next: "what the new global health architecture will look like and what role emerging actors can play."