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CARBON CAPTURE-
Contractor Abdullah Fahad Al Khaledi for General Contracting (Afac) was awarded site development and early works package by Aramco for its carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project, it said in a post on Linkedin. It said work has begun on the project, which Aramco is developing with US-German industrial gases giant Linde and leading oilfield services firm SLB.
About the project: Aramco is developing one of the world’s largest carbon capture and storage hubs with the capacity to store up to 9 mn tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2027. The first phase of the project — in Jubail Industrial City — will capture CO2 from three Aramco gas plants and other industrial sources before transporting them for storage in a targeted reservoir.
HOSPITALITY-
Capella Hotel Group — the hospitality arm of Singapore-based and privately-owned luxury real estate developer Pontiac Land — will open its first coastal destination in the Kingdom at Neom’s wellness retreat Elanan, according to a statement by Neom. The resort in Elanan, which is located in Neom’s Magna along the Gulf of Aqaba, will feature 80 bespoke rooms and suites. It will focus on providing a “holistic wellness experience” for guests, according to the statement.
HEALTHCARE-
A cheaper cancer treatment? King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre has succeeded in locally producing CAR-T cells to be used in cancer treatment, state news agency SPA reported. This will help cut treatment costs by nearly 80.8% to SAR 250k per patient instead of SAR 1.3 mn. It will also make the treatment accessible to patients within two weeks, with local production helping overcome shipping hurdles and costs associated with imports of the T-cells for treatment.
About the treatment: CAR-T cell therapy is an cancer treatment that sees the patient’s T cells altered in a laboratory so they attack cancer cells. It’s now being used to treat certain types of lymphoma and leukemia and researchers are looking now at whether it could be used to treat solid tumors (thin breast, lung, pancreas), glioblastoma, and neuroblastomas, among others.
By the numbers: While there is no recent official data on the number of cancer cases in the Kingdom, it is estimated that the Kingdom reported 21.8k new cases and 13.4k cancer-related deaths in 2022, according to figures (pdf) by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (Iarc).
