" How Patrick Soon-Shiong Made His Fortune Before Buying the L.A. Times "
He is currently Executive Chairman, Global Chief Medical & Technology Officer at ImmunityBio who makes Anktiva, aka Bioshield
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/01...e-la-times
Some interesting excerpts from the above article:
Few figures in modern medicine have inspired as much controversy as Soon-Shiong. “He gets very enthusiastic, and sometimes he might exaggerate,” Hentz said. “He can embellish a little.” Outcomes for his diabetes treatment were disappointing, and one case ended tragically. While pursuing this therapy, he also began researching chemotherapy. At the center of his fortune is a cancer treatment that costs more than a hundred times as much as another drug, available as a generic, that is prescribed for some of the same conditions. Soon-Shiong has been repeatedly accused of financial misrepresentation, self-dealing, price gouging, and fraud. He has been sued by former investors and business partners; he has been sued by other doctors; he has been sued by his own brother, twice; he has been sued by Cher.
My first conversation with Soon-Shiong took place this summer, over Zoom. He was indeed brilliant, charismatic, and enthusiastic, although I wouldn’t call him modest. Our conversations were wide-ranging and at times difficult to follow; he answered my first question with a five-minute monologue on protein interactions, the Large Hadron Collider, climate change, Kobe Bryant’s Achilles tendon, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the history of the human race. When a concept got technical, he would pull up a digital whiteboard, diagramming networks of cells, proteins, and computers.
By 1993, Soon-Shiong had recruited Steven Craig, his first human patient. Craig had been ravaged by Type 1 diabetes; although he had received a kidney transplant, he was gaunt and walked with a cane, and his eyesight was failing. At the time of his first islet-cell procedure, he was thirty-eight years old and had been unemployed for seven years. Soon-Shiong made a two-inch incision in Craig’s abdomen, then poured in hundreds of thousands of islet cells, taken from cadavers and wrapped in alginic gel. “It was a simple procedure,” Soon-Shiong said. “I wouldn’t even call it surgery.”
Before any long-term results could be determined, Soon-Shiong persuaded Craig to appear at a press conference. A week after the surgery, the “CBS Evening News” showed Craig eating a meal “without insulin, for the first time in thirty years.” Craig’s second procedure, later that year, was covered by the Los Angeles Times. “They’ve done miracles for me,” Craig told the paper.
Other researchers were skeptical. “I had people calling me up saying, ‘Diabetes has been cured!’ ” Scott King, who ran a competing islet-cell startup, said. “But then he’d take Craig to a conference, and people would ask to see clinical data, and Patrick would skillfully parry them.” Craig enjoyed being a star patient. “He got to go to Australia,” his stepson Matthew, who now works as a long-haul trucker, told me. “They seemed to treat him pretty damn well. We all got to stay at Beverly Garland’s hotel.” Soon-Shiong published his results in The Lancet, in 1994, but eventually Craig’s remaining kidney began to fail. The media stopped calling. “He grew depressed after that,” Craig’s ex-wife, Melodie, said. “He liked the attention.” In 1998, Craig checked into a hotel in Orange County and shot himself in the head.
Craig’s family told me that they did not blame Soon-Shiong for the suicide. “We understand that sometimes medical practices go wrong,” Matthew said. “That’s how they find out shit.” But Soon-Shiong’s promotional tactics may have damaged his reputation as a physician. He was publicly chastised by the head of the American Diabetes Association. “He told the world he was curing diabetes,” Michael Zinner, the former chief of surgery at U.C.L.A., told Forbes in 2003. “But, in the scientific realm, you need to have your results reproduced by others to have them validated.”
Soon-Shiong has labelled his approach to cancer “quantum oncotherapeutics,” although it does not rely on findings from quantum physics. He has a tendency to make his therapies sound more innovative than they are. When I asked him about Kobe Bryant’s Achilles-tendon surgery, he said, “The treatment for Achilles rupture is completely wrong. I asked Kobe if he wanted to dunk again, and he said yes. So we went completely against the doctor’s orders, and Kobe has his treatment, and he dunked again.” ElAttrache, who performed the surgery, told me, “That this was some sort of novel thing that no one else had considered, you know, I just, I don’t know . . . I think that’s a little bit of an overstatement.”
Soon-Shiong likes to present himself as an intellectual iconoclast, fighting a lonely war against the establishment. In reality, he has operated inside the boundaries of mainstream medical research, even in the islet-cell days. “At the time, I found this kind of self-promotion unethical,” Scott King said. “But I will say, now that I’m older, I realize you need someone like that on your side. He was good at raising money.”
He is currently Executive Chairman, Global Chief Medical & Technology Officer at ImmunityBio who makes Anktiva, aka Bioshield
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/01...e-la-times
Some interesting excerpts from the above article:
Few figures in modern medicine have inspired as much controversy as Soon-Shiong. “He gets very enthusiastic, and sometimes he might exaggerate,” Hentz said. “He can embellish a little.” Outcomes for his diabetes treatment were disappointing, and one case ended tragically. While pursuing this therapy, he also began researching chemotherapy. At the center of his fortune is a cancer treatment that costs more than a hundred times as much as another drug, available as a generic, that is prescribed for some of the same conditions. Soon-Shiong has been repeatedly accused of financial misrepresentation, self-dealing, price gouging, and fraud. He has been sued by former investors and business partners; he has been sued by other doctors; he has been sued by his own brother, twice; he has been sued by Cher.
My first conversation with Soon-Shiong took place this summer, over Zoom. He was indeed brilliant, charismatic, and enthusiastic, although I wouldn’t call him modest. Our conversations were wide-ranging and at times difficult to follow; he answered my first question with a five-minute monologue on protein interactions, the Large Hadron Collider, climate change, Kobe Bryant’s Achilles tendon, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the history of the human race. When a concept got technical, he would pull up a digital whiteboard, diagramming networks of cells, proteins, and computers.
By 1993, Soon-Shiong had recruited Steven Craig, his first human patient. Craig had been ravaged by Type 1 diabetes; although he had received a kidney transplant, he was gaunt and walked with a cane, and his eyesight was failing. At the time of his first islet-cell procedure, he was thirty-eight years old and had been unemployed for seven years. Soon-Shiong made a two-inch incision in Craig’s abdomen, then poured in hundreds of thousands of islet cells, taken from cadavers and wrapped in alginic gel. “It was a simple procedure,” Soon-Shiong said. “I wouldn’t even call it surgery.”
Before any long-term results could be determined, Soon-Shiong persuaded Craig to appear at a press conference. A week after the surgery, the “CBS Evening News” showed Craig eating a meal “without insulin, for the first time in thirty years.” Craig’s second procedure, later that year, was covered by the Los Angeles Times. “They’ve done miracles for me,” Craig told the paper.
Other researchers were skeptical. “I had people calling me up saying, ‘Diabetes has been cured!’ ” Scott King, who ran a competing islet-cell startup, said. “But then he’d take Craig to a conference, and people would ask to see clinical data, and Patrick would skillfully parry them.” Craig enjoyed being a star patient. “He got to go to Australia,” his stepson Matthew, who now works as a long-haul trucker, told me. “They seemed to treat him pretty damn well. We all got to stay at Beverly Garland’s hotel.” Soon-Shiong published his results in The Lancet, in 1994, but eventually Craig’s remaining kidney began to fail. The media stopped calling. “He grew depressed after that,” Craig’s ex-wife, Melodie, said. “He liked the attention.” In 1998, Craig checked into a hotel in Orange County and shot himself in the head.
Craig’s family told me that they did not blame Soon-Shiong for the suicide. “We understand that sometimes medical practices go wrong,” Matthew said. “That’s how they find out shit.” But Soon-Shiong’s promotional tactics may have damaged his reputation as a physician. He was publicly chastised by the head of the American Diabetes Association. “He told the world he was curing diabetes,” Michael Zinner, the former chief of surgery at U.C.L.A., told Forbes in 2003. “But, in the scientific realm, you need to have your results reproduced by others to have them validated.”
Soon-Shiong has labelled his approach to cancer “quantum oncotherapeutics,” although it does not rely on findings from quantum physics. He has a tendency to make his therapies sound more innovative than they are. When I asked him about Kobe Bryant’s Achilles-tendon surgery, he said, “The treatment for Achilles rupture is completely wrong. I asked Kobe if he wanted to dunk again, and he said yes. So we went completely against the doctor’s orders, and Kobe has his treatment, and he dunked again.” ElAttrache, who performed the surgery, told me, “That this was some sort of novel thing that no one else had considered, you know, I just, I don’t know . . . I think that’s a little bit of an overstatement.”
Soon-Shiong likes to present himself as an intellectual iconoclast, fighting a lonely war against the establishment. In reality, he has operated inside the boundaries of mainstream medical research, even in the islet-cell days. “At the time, I found this kind of self-promotion unethical,” Scott King said. “But I will say, now that I’m older, I realize you need someone like that on your side. He was good at raising money.”
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