Patrick Soon-Shiong Biography

Patrick Soon-Shiong (, ; b. July 29, 1952) is a South African-born American surgeon, medical researcher, businessman, philanthropist and a professor at University of California at Los Angeles. He is currently Chairman of the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation and Chairman and CEO of the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health, National LambdaRail, the Healthcare Transformation Institute and NantWorks, LLC. He is minority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and ranked by Forbes as the wealthiest American in the healthcare industry and in Los Angeles.

Early life

Soon-Shiong was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa to Chinese immigrant parents who fled from China during World War II. His parents are from Taishan in Guangdong, China. He graduated from high school at age 16 and received his medical degree at age 23 from the University of Witwatersrand, finishing fourth out of 189. After finishing his internship at Johannesburg's General Hospital, Soon-Shiong earned a Master of Science degree from the University of British Columbia, where he was the first resident to receive multiple research awards simultaneously from the American College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the American Association of Academic Surgery. He then moved to the United States where he initiated his surgical training at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), became a board-certified surgeon. Dr Soon-Shiong is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Canada) and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

Career

In 1993, he performed the world's first encapsulated human islet transplant and the first pig to man islet cell transplant in diabetic patients. He invented the nation's first FDA approved protein nanoparticle delivery technology for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer, doubling the response rate in patients. He received support from the National Institutes of Health, and the NASA Space Shuttle program. The drug, Abraxane, is now approved in over 40 countries, and currently in trials for lung, melanoma, gastric and pancreatic cancer. Soon-Shiong is a co-inventor of over 50 issued U.S. patents, has published more than 100 scientific papers. He has developed and sold two multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies, American Pharma Partners (APP) and Abraxis BioScience (ABII). APP was responsible for the only safe supply of Heparin in the United States in 2008, when supplies from other sources were found to be tainted.

Soon-Shiong was on the faculty of UCLA Medical School from 1983 to 1991. He briefly left UCLA in 1991 to start a diabetes and cancer biotechnology firm that eventually became American Pharmaceutical Partners and Abraxis BioScience. Soon-Shiong founded American Pharmaceutical Partners (APP) in 1997. He sold the company to Fresenius SE for $5.6 billion. in July 2008. Soon-Shiong sold Abraxis BioScience, maker of his drug Abraxane to Celgene in 2010 in cash-and-stock deal, valued at over $3 billion. He returned to UCLA during 2009 as a professor of microbiology, immunology, molecular genetics, and bioengineering.

Current work

Soon-Shiong founded a new company NantWorks in September 2011. The company has stated that its mission is 'to converge ultra-low power semiconductor technology, supercomputing, high performance, secure advanced networks and augmented intelligence to transform how we work, play, and live'. Soon-Shiong first founded NantHealth in 2007 to provide fiber-optic, cloud-based data infrastructure to share healthcare information. On October 2012, Soon-Shiong announced that NantHealth's supercomputer-based system and network is able to analyze the genetic data from a tumor sample in 47 seconds and transfer the data in 18 seconds. The goal of developing this infrastructure and digital technologies is to share the genomic information among sequencing centers, medical research hubs and hospitals, and to advance cancer research and big science endeavors such as The Cancer Genome Atlas. On January 2013, he founded another biotech company, NantOmics, to develop cancer drugs based on kinase inhibitors. Together with the sister company NantHealth, the two companies are part of the umbrella organization, NantWorks. Soon-Shiong stated that NantWorks's vision of the future cancer treatment is a convergence of multiple technologies that include diagnostics, supercomputing, network model of sharing data on tumor genes and personalized concoction of cancer drugs combination for multi-targeted attacks. The goal is to manage the cancer and achieve a sustained disease-free state.

In 2010, with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, Soon-Shiong founded the Healthcare Transformation Institute (HTI), which he dubs a "do-tank". HTI's mission is to promote a paradigm shift in health care in the United States by better integrating the three now separate domains of medical science, health delivery, and healthcare finance.

Soon-Shiong heads the CSS Institute for Advanced Health, founded in 2011 with a mission to provide high-speed computing capabilities for human genotyping to target specific cancer treatments, as well as technologies for the better management of chronic disease. Through the CSS Institute, Soon-Shiong is working to create a national health information network for the secure sharing of biomedical information. He is supporting the development of various wireless technologies for the better management of chronic disease.

Soon-Shiong is on several boards. These include the Board of Directors of the Mendez National Institute of Transplantation, and the board of directors for the Technology Council for the Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence at Northwestern University. He leads other organizations concurrently. He is Chairman of the National Coalition for Health Integration, and is the Executive Director of the UCLA Wireless Health Institute.

In 2010, in partnership with the LA Business Journal, Soon-Shiong founded the "Patrick Soon-Shiong Innovation Awards"; the first winners of these annual awards were six companies from the media, entertainment, engineering and aerospace sectors. The third annual Patrick Soon-Shiong Innovation Awards will take place in the fall of 2012.

In October 2010, he acquired a 4.5% stake in the Los Angeles Lakers after buying the shares of Earvin "Magic" Johnson.

In 2011 Forbes estimated his fortune at $7.2 billion, ranking him #39 among US billionaires. Soon-Shiong is ranked by Forbes as the wealthiest American in the healthcare industry, and by the Los Angeles Business Journal as the wealthiest person in Los Angeles.

Philanthropy

Soon-Shiong and his wife, Michele B. Chan, fund several health-related projects through the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation. In 2007 they pledged US $1billion to support healthcare transformation and a national health information highway. The Foundation has given a total of $135 million to the Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, and a guarantee of $100 million to enable the reopening of Martin Luther King Hospital in South Los Angeles, thereby restoring access to healthcare to a large underserved population.

In 2010, Soon-Shiong and his wife were asked to join Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in taking The Giving Pledge, by which several of the wealthiest Americans have pledged to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes.

In 2011 they endowed a new Chair at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, to support research at intersection of engineering and medicine, specifically computer science, mobile vision, and robotics.

Awards

Soon-Shiong's research has been recognized by national and international awards such as the Association for Academic Surgery Award for Research, the American College of Surgeons Schering Scholar, the Royal College Physicians and Surgeons Research Award, the Peter Kiewit Distinguished Membership in Medicine Award, and the International J.W. Hyatt Award for Service to Mankind. Soon-Shiong received the 2006 Gilda Club Award for the advancement of cancer medicine and is a recipient of a 2007 Ellis Island Medal of Honor as well as the St. Mary Medical Center Life Achievement Award in 2007 and the St. John's Health Center Caritas Award in 2007. In 2008, he received the Medical Visionary Award from the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network for his work in pancreatic cancer & the Los Angeles County Economic Development Council (LAEDC) Eddy Award in November 2009. The Los Angeles Business Journal recognized him as their 2010 Business Person of the Year, and the National Library of Medicine awarded Soon-Shiong the Distinguished Medical Science Award. The University of Arizona awarded him an honorary doctorate in December 2010, and Visiting Professor of the Imperial College of London in 2011.