Patrick Soon-Shiong

Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong (born July 29, 1952) is a South African-American billionaire surgeon, businessman, media mogul, and bioscientist. He is the inventor of the drug Abraxane, which became known for its efficacy against lung, breast, and pancreatic cancer.

Soon-Shiong is the founder of NantWorks, a network of health and technology startups; an adjunct professor of surgery and executive director of the Wireless Health Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles; and a visiting professor at Imperial College London and Dartmouth College. Soon-Shiong has published more than 100 scientific papers and has more than 230 issued patents worldwide on advancements spanning numerous fields in technology and medicine.

Soon-Shiong is the chairman of three non-profit organizations: the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation, which aims to fund research and erase disparities in access to health care and education; the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health, which is focused on changing the way health information is shared; and the Healthcare Transformation Institute, a partnership with the University of Arizona and Arizona State University.

He has been a minority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers since 2010, and since June 2018, he has been the owner and executive chairman of the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune. As of March 2020, Soon-Shiong is estimated by Forbes to have a net worth of US$6.9 billion. He has committed to the Giving Pledge and has pledged to give away at least half of his wealth to philanthropy.

Soon-Shiong was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to Chinese immigrant parents, who fled from China during the Japanese occupation in World War II. His parents were originally from Toisan in Guangdong province. His ancestral surname is Wong (Huang 黃).

Soon-Shiong graduated 4th out of his class of 189 from the University of Witwatersrand, receiving a bachelor's degree in medicine (MBBCh) at age 23. He completed his medical internship at Johannesburg's General Hospital. He then studied at the University of British Columbia, where he earned a master's degree in 1979, with research awards from the American College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the American Association of Academic Surgery.

He moved to the United States and began surgical training at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and became a board-certified surgeon in 1984. Soon-Shiong is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Canada) and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

Soon-Shiong joined UCLA Medical School in 1983 and served on that faculty until 1991, as a transplant surgeon. Between 1984 and 1987, he served as an associate investigator at the Center for Ulcer Research and Education. Soon-Shiong performed the first whole-pancreas transplant done at UCLA, and he developed and first performed the experimental Type 1 diabetes-treatment known as encapsulated-human-islet transplant, and the "first pig-to-man islet-cell transplant in diabetic patients." After a period in industry, he returned to UCLA in 2009, serving as a professor of microbiology, immunology, molecular genetics and bioengineering until this date. Soon-Shiong served as a visiting professor at Imperial College, London, in 2011.

In 1991, Soon-Shiong left UCLA to start a diabetes and cancer biotechnology firm called VivoRx Inc. This led to the founding in 1997 of APP Pharmaceuticals, of which he held 80% of outstanding stock and sold to Fresenius SE for $4.6 billion in July 2008. Soon-Shiong later founded Abraxis BioScience (maker of the drug, Abraxane, that he invented), a company he sold to Celgene in 2010 in cash-and-stock deal, valued at over $3 billion.

Soon-Shiong founded NantHealth in 2007 to provide fiber-optic, cloud-based data infrastructure to share healthcare information. Soon-Shiong went on to found NantWorks in September 2011, whose mission was "to converge ultra-low power semiconductor technology, supercomputing, high performance, secure advanced networks and augmented intelligence to transform how we work, play, and live." In October 2012, Soon-Shiong announced that NantHealth's supercomputer-based system and network were 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 was to share 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. In January 2013, he founded another biotech company, NantOmics, to develop cancer drugs based on protein kinase inhibitors. NantOmics and its sister company, NantHealth, were subsidiaries of NantWorks. Soon-Shiong stated that NantWorks' vision for the future of cancer treatment was a convergence of multiple technologies that included diagnostics, supercomputing, network modeling of sharing data on tumor genes and personalized cocktails of cancer drugs in multi-target attacks, to 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 shift in health care in the United States by better integrating the three now separate domains of medical science, health delivery, and healthcare finance. In 2014, Soon-Shiong funded online streaming music service AccuRadio, investing $2.5 million into the first round of funding for America's fastest-growing music webcaster. 

In July 2015, Soon-Shiong initiated an IPO for NantKwest (formerly ConkWest) that represented the highest value biotech IPO in history, at a market value of $2.6 billion. In April 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported that Soon-Shiong received a pay package in 2015 from NantKwest worth almost $148 million, making him one of the highest paid CEOs. Soon-Shiong is also a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council.

In 2014 Soon-Shiong made a $12 million donation to the University of Utah, which was subject to media scrutiny and alleged the Foundation engaged in prohibited transactions between the university and Patrick Soon-Shiong and his related company. On May 29, 2019, the IRS completed its audit of the donation and found no violation. In addition, the State of Utah Office of the Legislative Auditor General audited the Nonprofits’ donation and similarly found no violation.

In early 2016, Soon-Shiong launched the National Immunotherapy Coalition to encourage rival pharmaceutical companies to work together to test combinations of cancer-fighting drugs. He has also met numerous times with former vice president Joe Biden to discuss more ambitious approaches to fighting cancer, including conducting genomic sequencing of 100,000 patients to create a massive database of potential genetic factors.

In early January 2017, as announced by Sean Spicer, then President-elect Donald Trump met with Soon-Shiong at his Bedminster, NJ, estate to discuss national medical priorities. In May 2017, Dr. Soon-Shiong was appointed by House Speaker Paul Ryan to the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee, a committee established by the 21st Century Cures Act.