KFSHRC Used Its 2026 Conference to Pitch Trial Sites

King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre opened the Riyadh conference on January 19, 2026, under the title Clinical Research Transformation: Future Outlook 2026. Henry Wei, head of development innovation at Regeneron, gave the keynote on the geopolitics of running clinical trials in Saudi Arabia.

The hospital’s own agenda billed the day as a clinical trials transformation meeting. Preconference workshops and a campus tour on January 18 were opened to researchers, scientists, investors and pharmaceutical staff, which is the list of people the Kingdom needed in the building.

Henry Wei’s Keynote Framed the Geopolitics of Saudi Trials

Abdulrazaq S. Al-Jazairi, a KFSHRC pharmacist who directs the hospital’s Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative Division, chaired the meeting as conference president. Bjorn Zoega, the deputy chief executive, handled the opening and the sponsor recognition block. Prof. Jackie Y. Ying, chief innovation and research officer, spoke on building a research path from idea to clinic.

Wei’s 30-minute slot sat on Session I, Keeping Saudi Arabia on the Edge in Advanced Biotechnology Research. The title on the program was Addressing the Geopolitical Environment in Relation to Robustly Conducting Clinical Trials in Saudi Arabia. That is a site-selection talk. It is what a sponsor asks before it places a protocol, a budget and a pharmacovigilance file in a new country.

Four days earlier, on January 14, 2026, the Saudi Food and Drug Authority had put numbers under that pitch: an 83 percent rise in biotechnology trial filings in 2025, a 39 percent rise in early-stage trials, about 2,700 patients on those studies, and a Reliance Pathway that the authority said cut study approval times by 74% against its standard track.

KFSHRC posted its own recap of the meeting later that week.

#التخصصي يعقد مؤتمر التحول في الدراسات السريرية: تطلعات مستقبلية 2026 بالرياض، بهدف دعم تطوير منظومة الأبحاث السريرية في المملكة، وتعزيز تكامل البحث العلمي مع التطبيق السريري، بما يسهم في تسريع تطوير العلاجات النوعية ورفع كفاءة منظومة الابتكار الطبي. pic.twitter.com/SXgYXRL46J

— مستشفى الملك فيصل التخصصي ومركز الأبحاث (@KFSHRC) January 23, 2026

Al-Jazairi described the day as a chance to show what the hospital can run and to open channels with the people in the room. Khaled Sehly, then Bristol Myers Squibb’s market access and government-affairs lead for the GCC, sat on the afternoon panel whose title already named the hole in the pitch.

When evidence generation, regulatory frameworks, and access pathways are in sync, patients gain faster.

Khaled Sehly, market access director, Bristol Myers Squibb GCC, after the Riyadh conference

The panel was called Biotechnology Breakthroughs: Why the Momentum is not Matching the Promise. The hospital printed that doubt into the program. It did not wait for an outside critic to raise it.

Who Sat in the Room With KFSHRC

The speaking list was a buyer’s map of a trial jurisdiction: the drug firms that place studies, the regulator that clocks them, the national institute that counts them, and the CROs that have to keep a Saudi legal presence to file.

THE BUYERS AND THE GATEKEEPERS

• The keynote sponsor: Regeneron sent Wei from New York to talk through the politics of placing trials in the Kingdom.
• The product companies: Novartis, Roche, Lilly, AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb took presentation or panel seats, with Thermo Fisher Scientific on clinical operations.
• The Saudi gate: SFDA, the Saudi National Institute of Health, the Ministry of Health’s investment deputy and the Royal Commission for Riyadh City sat on the first regulatory panel.
• The operators: Parexel, Duke’s Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative and a local CRO, Pharmaceutical Development Company, spoke on complex trials, AI files and how collaboration actually runs.

Sami Al-Qarawi of the Royal Commission, Khalid AlBurikan from the health ministry, Ibrahim Alsubaihi of SNIH and Omaima Arab of SFDA’s trials section were the domestic half of that first hour. The foreign half was the reason the hour existed.

135 Trials, and One Hospital Ran Nearly Half

SNIH’s 2025 performance figures, issued in the same season as the conference, are the cleanest public count of how large the market actually is. The institute logged 135 registered clinical trials in 2025, up 53.4% from 88 in 2024 and up from 54 in 2023.

REGISTERED TRIALS COUNTED BY SNIH

Company-sponsored work made up 63.7% of that 2025 total, and healthcare institutions or researchers the other 36.3%. Endocrine and metabolic studies led the mix at 15.5%, then neurological disease at 14.1%, then musculoskeletal, skin, pain and autoimmune work at 13.3%. SNIH said most of the operational load sat with three CROs, Balsam Clinical Research, ArabMED and IQVIA, and that Saudi Arabia ranked 17th among G20 countries on ClinicalTrials.gov.

KFSHRC is not a peer among many Saudi sites. On September 10, 2025, the hospital said it had run 48 percent of nationwide trials in early 2025, with 104 studies active and 80 new ones being opened. A separate KFSHRC note, using SNIH data for the end of 2024, put the hospital at 52% of 470 active studies in the Kingdom. Those two shares describe different clocks, one a half-year of registered trials and one a year-end stock of active studies, and both still point at the same structure: if sponsors come, they come to this campus first.

The campus has something to show besides a podium. KFSHRC said it treated a first patient with locally made CAR-T cells in a Phase I study for relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia, cutting the listed cost from 1.3 million riyals to about 250,000 riyals a case and the production window from 28 days to 12 to 14 days. In 2023 it reported more than 1,300 peer-reviewed papers and 18 patents. The Clinical Research Department, opened in December 2020, still described itself as a shop for Phase II to IV work that would add Phase I later. That is the tell. The hospital can run late work now. First-in-human capacity was still a promise on its own service page.

The Reliance Pathway Cut Study Approvals by 74%

SFDA’s January 14, 2026 release is the regulator’s half of the sales sheet. Faster clocks are what a global protocol team buys, because a stalled ethics or import file in Riyadh delays every other country on the same study.

WHAT SFDA PUT ON THE TABLE FOR 2025

• Biotech filings: Applications for advanced-therapy and biotechnology product trials rose 83% from the year before.
• Early-stage work: Early-stage clinical trials rose 39% overall.
• Patients on study: About 2,700 people received those investigational treatments through the trials.
• The speed claim: The Reliance Pathway cut study approval times by 74% compared with the standard track.

A foreign sponsor without a Saudi legal entity still has to file through a licensed local CRO, and the rules call for a full-time Saudi national with trial experience to sit on that file. That is why Balsam, ArabMED and IQVIA appear in the SNIH note, and why Parexel and Thermo Fisher were in the hall. The conference was also a staffing exercise for the middle of the market, not only a science meeting.

Half the Studies Aimed at 100 Patients or Fewer

A registry analysis of ClinicalTrials.gov records with at least one Saudi site, running through August 2025, found 1,502 studies. Most were interventional (1,134, or 75.5%), with 366 observational studies and 2 expanded-access files. Nonindustry sponsors led 73.0% of those registrations. Half the trials planned to enroll 100 people or fewer. Only 12.1% had posted results. Activity clustered in Riyadh, with smaller nodes in Jeddah and Dammam. Industry’s Phase 1 footprint in that set was 2 studies.

Those figures live on a different register from SNIH’s 135 trials in 2025, and they cover a longer clock, so they should not be averaged or stacked as one total. They do show the shape of the work Saudi sites have actually joined: a lot of hospital and investigator studies, a thinner commercial early-phase bench, modest planned enrollment, and weak public posting of outcomes. A country that wants to be a late-stage vaccine and biologics hub still looks, on that ledger, like an add-on geography for other people’s Phase 3 programs.

Rare-disease families in the Kingdom run into the same wall in plain language. The studies they can name are still recruiting in the United States, even when the Riyadh campus is presented as an advanced research center. That is the access gap Sehly was pointing at, and it sits downstream of the 74% clock. A faster SFDA letter does not, by itself, open a protocol that was written for U.S. sites.

What Vision 2030’s Biotech Plan Commits To

The conference release tied the day to Vision 2030 and to the National Biotechnology Strategy, which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched on January 25, 2024. The official strategy page is blunt about the scoreboard: lead the Middle East and North Africa by 2030, lead globally by 2040, add $34.6 billion to non-oil GDP by 2040 (3% of that total), and create 11,000 high-quality jobs by 2030 and 55,000 by 2040.

THE BIOTECH SCOREBOARD ON THE VISION 2030 PAGE

The four official directions are vaccines, biomanufacturing and localization, genomics, and plant optimization. Clinical trials sit under the first three. A regional hub for late-stage vaccine development, a biologics plant that can export, and a genomic database that feeds prevention all need Saudi patients on protocols, not only Saudi speakers on panels. Ying’s brief at KFSHRC is the hospital version of that chain: biomarkers, animal work and trials inside one institution so a finding does not die between labs.

Brand Finance Lifted KFSHRC to 12th in February

At the January meeting the hospital cited its 2025 Brand Finance place: first in the Middle East and Africa and 15th among the world’s top 250 academic medical centers, plus a claim to the highest-valued healthcare brand in Saudi Arabia and the region on the 2024 brand list, and slots on the World’s Best Hospitals 2025, Best Smart Hospitals 2026 and Best Specialized Hospitals 2026 lists. The Riyadh campus already treats that claim as an operational fact, including high-risk surgical programs on the same campus.

THE DATES BEHIND THE WAGER

1. December 2020: KFSHRC opens the Clinical Research Department to run prospective trials as a single office.
2. January 25, 2024: The Crown Prince launches the National Biotechnology Strategy.
3. September 10, 2025: KFSHRC says it ran 48% of the Kingdom’s registered trials in the first half of 2025.
4. January 14, 2026: SFDA posts the 83%, 39%, 2,700-patient and 74% figures.
5. January 18 and 19, 2026: The workshops, campus tour and one-day conference run in Riyadh.
6. February 5, 2026: Brand Finance places KFSHRC 12th among the world’s top 250 hospitals, up from 15th, and as the strongest hospital brand in MENA, on a survey of 2,500 health professionals in 30 countries.

The February rank arrived 17 days after the conference, so it is a brand result, not a trial result. The trial result is still the 135 studies, the 48% share, the two industry Phase 1 entries on the ClinicalTrials.gov cut, and the 12.1% of studies that posted outcomes. Sehly’s test still applies. Patients gain when the evidence file, the SFDA clock and the actual recruiting site move together. The 11,000 jobs and the $34.6 billion are how the rest of the wager will be scored.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a completed conference and on trial figures published by KFSHRC, SFDA, SNIH, Brand Finance and a ClinicalTrials.gov registry analysis. It is informational only and is not medical advice, not a recommendation to join any study, and not investment advice on any company that appeared on the program. Anyone considering a trial should speak with a licensed physician and read the official protocol and consent form for that study. Counts, ranks and approval-time claims reflect the cited publications on their stated dates and can be revised in later releases.