Today Dubai Healthcare City is little more than 435 acres of windswept sand and four small office buildings, but in three to five years the city will emerge as a regional hub of medical training and research, if leaders of Harvard Medical International (HMI) have their way.

Since last month, three Western medical organizations including pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson have announced their intent to locate offices in the nascent city.

And on June 12, Harvard established the Dubai Harvard Foundation for Medical Research, which will provide funding for medical researchers from the region. Researchers will likely focus their studies on public health issues such as diabetes that afflict the Middle East.

Since then, the Foundation has raised nearly $20 million in donations from members of two Middle Eastern royal families.

On June 14, Dubai Crown Prince and United Arab Emirates Defence Minister His Royal Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum donated $13.6 million for the creation of the Maktoum-Harvard Library in Dubai Healthcare City.

Six days later, His Royal Highness Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, Chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company, a Saudi-based firm, donated approximately five million dollars in unrestricted funds to the Foundation.

Harvard’s program in Dubai—HMI’s largest and the only one with a land team—was launched in 2003, after members of Dubai’s royal family approached Harvard, asking for their collaboration on the project.

“[The Dubai initiative] is not just a hospital,” said Dr. Robert K. Crone, HMI’s President and CEO. “It’s really the creation of a comprehensive academic medical campus, like what you would see in the Longwood medical area.”

“But we have the opportunity to do it even better than we have here [in Boston] because we can plan it from the ground up,” he added.

Crone said he and others at HMI travel to Dubai monthly to monitor Harvard’s developments.

HMI was created in 1994 by Dr. Daniel C. Tosteson, then Dean of the Medical School, to provide medical advice and expertise to countries developing health care infrastructure.

“Harvard, and I think the medical community, have a strong feeling that we’re part of a global environment and that we have a moral obligation to reach out across the world,” said Dr. Benjamin P. Sachs, who serves on HMI’s Board of Directors. “If they call up and say they want advice...we have a structured way of doing that through HMI.”

The royal government pays HMI for its services in Dubai Healthcare City, which include running the city’s educational center—the Harvard Medical School Dubai Center, a post-graduate and continuing education training facility—and supervising the city’s growth and the quality of its healthcare programs through the Center for Planning and Quality.

HMI also funds research through the Dubai Harvard Foundation. It carefully vets donors to the foundation to ensure that they are “upstanding citizens of the community, who genuinely want to invest in the human capital of the Middle East,” Crone said.

The post-graduate medical center figures prominently in Harvard’s plans for the region.

“Right now there’s no place [in the region] for [people graduating from medical school] to do the specialty training they need,” said Robert L. Thurer, the center’s chief academic officer.

This void of post-graduate training programs particularly hurts women, who comprise over 60 percent of medical school graduates and whose families customs make it difficult for them to travel abroad to continue their education, Thurer said.

It has not yet been decided whether graduates will receive Harvard degrees.

HMI will be “setting the standards for the care being provided, not providing the care itself. That’s an important distinction,” said HMI board member George E. Thibault.

Dubai’s political stability and relatively open society have uniquely positioned it to partner with organizations like Harvard attempting to improve health care in the Middle East.

“The reason Dubai is particularly attractive [is that] in a region with considerable need, Dubai is well positioned to become a regional center for both education and healthcare,” Crone said when the Dubai initiative began in 2003. “It in itself has an excellent infrastructure and is an open society with regards to accepting individuals of all race, color and creed.”

Dubai is the second largest of the seven kingdoms that compose the United Arab Emirates, a country situated just west of Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf. Dubai Healthcare City is located within the kingdom of Dubai.

Dubai Healthcare City was designed as a “free zone” within Dubai, making investors exempt from laws that would otherwise place restrictions on the level of international ownership of firms and the ability of those firms to take their profits out of the country.

—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.