Egypt intercontinental rail plan needs go-ahead for Saudi bridge
Egypt is aiming to link its expanding railway network with Asia and Europe, but it hasn’t yet been able to finalize plans to build a bridge to Saudi Arabia.
In the meantime, it will use ships to bring cargo across the Red Sea, Reuters reports. Saudi’s King Salman first announced the bridge project in 2016, envisioning a road that would cross the Straits of Tiran to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
If completed, the route would compete with another notional rail project that would connect the UAE to Israel’s Haifa Port through Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
Another project on the drawing board would run north from the Gulf through Iraq.
Novartis seeks to close gap with U.S. in Gulf drug approvals
Novartis, Europe’s second-largest drugmaker, is seeking to obtain broader rights from regulators to sell its newest medicines in the UAE and neighboring Gulf countries as soon as they are approved in the U.S.
Mohamed Ezz Eldin, a 25-year Novartis veteran who runs operations in the Gulf, said the Swiss company is also tapping into genetic data with partners from the region to develop new treatments for rare diseases and illnesses prevalent in the Middle East.
“Our key focus is ensuring that patients eligible for our medicines have access,” Ezz Eldin said in an interview with The Circuit. The Novartis executive, who is based in Dubai, signed a research partnership agreement this week with the Emirates Dermatology Association.
Among the company’s priority activities in the Gulf are development of advanced digital health technologies, AI-based diagnostics and nuclear medicine treatments for cancer, Ezz Eldin said.
The company is also working with the Emirati Genome Program, which analyzes genetic data collected from donors to conduct research with government health authorities and other pharmaceutical firms. Novartis is also supporting the Abu Dhabi Investment Office’s Health, Endurance Longevity and Medicine cluster, known as HELM, in which the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund is a strategic partner.
The UAE, which aspires to become a regional center for biotech development, expects the genome program to yield insights into disease onset and progression, the impact on high-risk populations, and possible new treatments.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your priorities for growth in the Gulf?
Our key focus is ensuring that patients eligible for our medicines have access. We partner with authorities and societies to expand access to innovative medicines. We aim to ensure that every eligible patient can access our therapies and adhere to treatment. Access, bringing innovation to the UAE and the GCC, and patient education are core to what we do. In the UAE, patients have almost simultaneous access to medicines after FDA approval. Through partnerships with authorities, we ensure patient and disease awareness to support access.
What areas of research is Novartis engaged with in the region?
AI applied to research is one. One of our most important key performance indicators is how fast our innovative medicines and advanced therapies are available in the UAE. Recently, the UAE was the second or third globally to register and make available several of our medicines, such as cell and gene therapies. Advanced therapies like radioligand therapy for prostate cancer were available in the UAE almost simultaneously with the U.S. and Europe. Speed of registration, availability, reimbursement, and patient access are critical KPIs for us.
You’ve spoken about the importance of regional partnerships. Which organizations is Novartis working with?
Our partnerships extend across a broad spectrum. We are proud to partner with authorities across the Emirates in areas like disease awareness and patient support programs. We have a partnership with the Emirates Dermatology Society focused on disease awareness, education, and degeneration. We also partnered with the Department of Health in Abu Dhabi on drug establishment.
Across different therapy areas, we focus on access to innovation, patient support programs, disease awareness, and other activities. We recently expanded our clinical research activities here. We are proud to have evidence generation, real-world evidence studies, and clinical trials. We also partnered with the DOH on the genomic project they are running.
What does Novartis’ genetic research in the Gulf entail?
We are in a collaborative phase with the Department of Health and other global pharma companies to identify research questions that we can solve together. Initially, we are assessing the linkage between genomic profiling, electronic medical records, and biobank data. After this phase, we aim to launch individual research projects to understand disease onset, high-risk populations, and disease progression, with the goal of prevention and individualized treatment.
Saudi LEAP conference chalks up $14.9 billion in new investments
Saudi Arabia kicked off its LEAP25 conference with a flurry of billion-dollar deals and a campaign to rebrand the kingdom as a cauldron of tech innovation on par with Europe.
Opening the annual LEAP event in Riyadh on Sunday night, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Al-Swaha ticked off a series of investments worth $14.9 billion that were due to be signed this week.
Al-Swaha attributed the kingdom’s tech growth to the Vision 2030 roadmap introduced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017 to diversify the economy and wean it off its longtime dependence on oil sales.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Al-Swaha said. “As a tech force, as His Royal Highness said, this region is the new Europe.” Based on the number of startups gestating in the kingdom, he said, Saudi Arabia would be the fifth largest tech hub if it were located in the EU zone.
Touted as the biggest tech exhibition in the world, LEAP25 attracts many of the major biggest players, including Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, Cisco, SAP, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba and Huawei.
More than 1,800 international and local exhibitors, including 680 startups, are populating the exhibition floor at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Center.
Among the deals announced at the event, Groq, a U.S.-based artificial intelligence firm, said it will invest $1.5 billion in a project developed with Saudi Aramco to launch the world’s largest AI inferencing data center in Saudi Arabia, Arab News reports.
U.S.-based Databricks pledged to invest $300 million over the next three years to upskill Saudi citizens, build the company’s business in the kingdom, and contribute to the local digital economy. SambaNova, another U.S. software firm, agreed to invest $140 million to build advanced AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.
Tara Brady, President of Google for Europe, the Middle East and Africa said the company will contribute $70 billion to the kingdom’s economy over the next 10 years.
Masdar chases European green energy projects after Endesa deal
UAE renewables company Masdar says it will continue to chase green energy projects in Europe, where high interest rates and rising debt costs are pushing utilities to sell stakes in wind farms and solar plants.
Masdar, which is owned by Mubadala, ADNOC and Abu Dhabi National Energy Co., has a goal of reaching 100 gigawatts of capacity in its portfolio by 2030 and has been quick to pounce on European projects that will help it rapidly scale up.
Last week it reached an $885 million agreement with Madrid-based Endesa to buy a 49.9% share of 48 solar farms with 2 gigawatts of capacity.
And in June it agreed to buy a majority stake in Greece’s biggest renewables company Terna Energy, in a deal that valued the company at $3.4 billion.
Masdar CFO Mazin Khan told Reuters that “normalization” of asset prices had created big opportunities in Europe and the Endesa deal was just a first step in its investment plans.
