11/06/2026

BIZ & FINANCE THURSDAY | JUNE 11, 2026

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mRNA cancer vaccines advance despite US cuts

‘The Donald of Dubai’: Property tycoon seeks to become data king DUBAI: A UAE real estate magnate close to Donald Trump is pumping billions of dollars into data centres, hoping to cash in on the AI boom and become the global leader in the field. Damac Properties chairman Hussain Sajwani, who attended the US president’s 2025 inauguration and is second on Forbes’ Arab rich list, sees “huge” potential in data as demand for computing power soars. Sajwani, whose Instagram feed pictures him with the likes of Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, rode Dubai’s real estate rollercoaster to amass a net worth of US$15.3 billion (RM62 billion), according to Forbes. “We’re part vision and part being lucky, and thank God, today we’re building a beautiful business,“ he told AFP by video call from the Datacloud Global Congress in Cannes. He described how hours of video calls during the Covid-19 pandemic convinced him to pivot to data centres, before OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 set off a frenzy over AI. Sajwani has earmarked sites in 13 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East which, if all completed, will have a total capacity of 6,000 megawatts, costing roughly US$66 billion to build. “The idea came during Covid, where everybody was locked down and I was spending a lot of hours on Zoom,“ Sajwani said. “It was very obvious that Zoom and other businesses that were doing e-commerce were going to grow. “So I thought the data centre business would have a future. Honestly, I never thought there would be such growth.” A mix of opportunism and good fortune has made Sajwani one of the Middle East’s biggest property developers, earning him the nickname “the Donald of Dubai”. He started in catering but moved into property in the 1990s, leaving him well positioned for a real estate boom when Dubai opened its market to foreign buyers in 2002. After surviving near-wipeout during the 2008 global financial crisis, Damac has built 60,000 properties with another 60,000 under construction and operates in a dozen countries, Sajwani said. In 2017, he opened Dubai’s Trump International Golf Club, and early last year he stood side-by-side with the newly inaugurated president to announce a US$20 billion investment in US data centres. Damac Digital, launched in 2021, has now completed sites in Thailand and Saudi Arabia, with eight in total expected to be operational by the year’s end. The footprint also includes Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Italy, Finland and Sweden, as well as the United Arab Emirates. Sajwani was unfazed by the Middle East war, where drones struck data centres in the UAE and Bahrain during the initial weeks of Iranian attacks. “We took the decision four, five years ago to do data centres and we’ve continued,“ Sajwani said. “The war has proven to us that UAE is quite resilient and the government did a great job of defending the country.” Five “hyperscalers” have signed up as clients for Damac’s data centres. Although Damac cannot disclose their names, hyperscalers are major players in cloud and AI services and include brands such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Sajwani said Damac Digital was now on course to outstrip Damac Properties as the biggest company in his empire, which also includes investment and logistics arms. “Now we have almost 6,000 (megawatts) landbank,“ he added, referring to parcels of land with enough power and fibre connectivity to support a data centre. “If we build all that, that’s huge.”

CHICAGO: Treatments based on the same mRNA technology that delivered Covid-19 vaccines to market in record time are showing lasting benefit against the deadly skin cancer melanoma and early promise in pancreatic and brain cancers once considered impervious to immune system assault. The apparent breakthroughs in cancer vaccines – deemed one of the fastest-growing segments of cancer research – are arriving even as US officials send conflicting signals about the technology’s merits and safety. More than 130 studies were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago this month focused on such efforts. At the forefront was Moderna and Merck, whose treatment combining a powerful immunotherapy drug with an experimental made-to-order mRNA cancer vaccine has kept melanoma at bay for five years, a milestone in efforts to create personalised vaccines to train the immune system to fight cancer. The companies are testing mRNA-based therapies in nine large and midsize trials in lung, kidney, bladder and pancreas cancers, and may have early results from their large confirmatory trial in melanoma this year. Elsewhere, years of early research at university and medical centres have progressed to development programs at pharmaceutical companies including Roche and BioNTech. Market research firm Vision Research Reports forecast the market for personalised cancer vaccines driven largely by mRNA technology could reach US$8.5 billion (RM35 billion) annually by 2034. In infectious diseases, certain vaccines can teach the immune system to recognise and attack the virus, offering long-lasting protection. “That principle can now be applied to cancer, and that’s a big advance,” Merck chief medical officer Eliav Barr said. These advances come even as the US Department of Health and Human Services led by anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr cut US$500 million in mRNA vaccine projects. Kennedy has attacked the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines without evidence and has made exaggerated claims about side effects. Still, the National Cancer Institute is collaborating with the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health on a US$200 million public-private partnership to fund trials of promising cancer vaccines, including those based on mRNA. An HHS spokesman defended Kennedy’s stance on mRNA for infectious diseases but said he sees promise in mRNA technology to prevent cancer recurrence, pointing to the cancer vaccine partnership. Dividing mRNA research into silos, however, may stunt advances in a promising technology safely given to more than 700 million people during the Covid pandemic, scientists said. “We have to be able to innovate around technologies that are going to improve healthcare for all,” said Dr Elias Sayour, who directs an RNA engineering lab at the University

o Scientists see growing potential for personalised vaccines to train the immune system to fight tumours

Early trial data showed seven of eight pancreatic tumour patients who responded to a personalised mRNA vaccine remained alive up to six years later. – PEXELS PIX

of Florida and is an adviser to NCI’s cancer vaccine effort. “If we don’t do it, other countries will.” A decade ago, Dr Vinod Balachandran of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre was among the early scientists who saw potential in mRNA to treat even the deadliest cancers. He noticed that in rare cases, some patients were able to survive pancreatic cancer, a disease scientists believed was invisible to the immune system. Studies revealed that in these cases, the patients’ immune systems were able to recognise and attack their tumours. The question was how to make this more common. Balachandran believed mRNA, which can be made quickly, could be used to devise custom vaccines based on specific mutations found only on patients’ tumours after surgery. A phase 1 trial of 16 patients kicked off in December of 2019 testing a combination of chemotherapy, Roche’s immunotherapy Tecentriq and a made-to-order mRNA vaccine from BioNTech targeting mutated proteins based on individual patients’ tumours. At the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in April, Balachandran reported that of the eight pancreas cancer patients whose immune systems responded to the vaccine, seven were still alive up to six years later. A 260-patient global phase 2 trial is underway to confirm those results. “What a breakthrough it would be if mRNA was the technology that finally was able to achieve an immune response that was clinically meaningful,” said Dr Robert Vonderheide, director of Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer

Centre and AACR’s president-elect. Messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, is naturally present in every cell of the body. Its job is to carry genetic instructions from the cell nucleus to parts of cells that make specific proteins. University of Florida’s Sayour calls mRNA the software of the human body. It can be reprogrammed to do a number of tasks including making proteins that train the immune system to attack infectious pathogens or rogue cancer cells, he said. Such work is being done at Mount Sinai, where Brian Brown, director of the Icahn Genomics Institute, has developed a method of designing lipid nanoparticles – the fat bubbles that deliver mRNA into cells – to control where in the body it goes. A study published in Nature Biotechnology in April suggests mRNA could be amplified or quieted to increase the immune response or tamp down harmful reactions, leading to more potent cancer treatments or new ways to treat autoimmune disease. Sayour has designed a vaccine that involves injecting clusters of lipid nanoparticles into patients with glioblastoma instead of a single nanoparticle used in Covid vaccines. Delivered intravenously, the aim is to quickly spur the immune system to fight the fast-growing brain cancer, which has a 5-year survival rate of under 7%. Taking on a cancer like glioblastoma is a tall order for a vaccine, Sayour noted. But, he said, “if it can cure or even make a dent in glioblastoma, the implications for all forms of human cancer, in my mind, are extraordinary.” – Reuters facilitate the flow of funds outside regulated banking systems. Japanese startup JPYC began issuing stablecoins pegged to the yen in October last year in a sign of small but steady change in a country where cash and credit cards remain dominant means of payment. In a proposal this month, a ruling party panel also called for promoting usage of yen based stablecoins for settlement in Asia. – Reuters

Japan’s largest banks to launch stablecoins by March 2027 TOKYO: Japan’s three largest banks said yesterday they will jointly issue stablecoins during the current fiscal year ending in March 2027, a sign of growing momentum for digital payments in a country where cash and credit cards remain popular. prepare for the issuance, they said in a statement. Japan’s Financial Services Agency has been supporting the experimental stage of the project as part of the country’s efforts to use blockchain technology to enhance payment systems.

The banking arms of Japan’s three largest financial groups – Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Mizuho Financial Group – will set up a council to examine operational frameworks and

Stablecoins have been strongly backed by US President Donald Trump and interest has been growing globally, but some policymakers have expressed concern that they could