Upon graduation, in , he applied to medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. The school registered two hundred students that year, following a strict racial-quota system: a hundred and ninety-six white students, two Indian, and two Chinese. To gain acceptance, Soon-Shiong had to be one of the best Chinese test-takers in the country. The school awarded M.
While his counterparts in America were suffering through organic chemistry, Soon-Shiong was practicing medicine in a Black township. His wish was granted, on the condition that he work for half pay. He remembers being the only Asian doctor in the facility.
After his supervisor threatened to remove the patient, he relented; Soon-Shiong diagnosed him as having a sinus infection and had it drained. During his rotations, he also worked in a hospital in the Black township of Soweto. He described working there in , at the time of the Soweto uprising, which was led by Black schoolchildren. South African police opened fire, and at least a hundred and seventy-six people were killed. In , he and Michele immigrated to Canada. She was a Chinese South African as well; the two met at a basketball game when he was in medical school.
They have two children. He brought a bit of South Africa with him. Apartheid had left South Africa isolated from the international community, and the medical culture had a swashbuckling feel.
Still, he told me that he had not been personally discriminated against. By the early nineteen-nineties, there were at least a dozen biotech startups pursuing islet-cell therapies for diabetes. Outcomes were generally disappointing; in most cases, patients would enjoy a few days of remission before the cells were rejected. Soon-Shiong believed that he had solved this problem by encapsulating the cells in alginic acid, a gel derived from seaweed which is also used to thicken ice cream.
In , he implanted these capsules in a dog, using cells sourced from pigs. It seemed to work. By , 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. Before any long-term results could be determined, Soon-Shiong persuaded Craig to appear at a press conference. Other researchers were skeptical. The media stopped calling. He was publicly chastised by the head of the American Diabetes Association.
In , he co-founded a startup called VivoRx, with his brother Terrence, a London real-estate developer. In , VivoRx secured five million dollars in funding from the generic-drug maker Mylan Laboratories; that year, Patrick started a new company to develop a chemotherapy drug. The companies were independent, but some employees worked for both.
On June 29, , the company convened a special board meeting in Santa Monica. Patrick told me that he was asked to sign a document, which he did. Patrick had acquired two pharmaceutical factories in Patrick denies this, and says that he obtained independent financing.
At the time of their acquisition, the factories, which manufactured generic injectable drugs, had lost money for nine straight years. In , American Pharmaceutical conducted an I. Meanwhile, Soon-Shiong continued to develop his chemotherapy drug. In the early two-thousands, he showed up at the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists.
He had scheduled a meeting with William Gradishar, a breast-cancer specialist at Northwestern University. Soon-Shiong was pitching a new formulation of the generic chemotherapy drug paclitaxel, which is derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. Paclitaxel was reasonably effective, but it had to be dissolved in a castor-oil product, which could cause allergic reactions—on rare occasions, fatal ones.
Soon-Shiong said that he could make the drug safer and more effective by binding paclitaxel to albumin, a protein produced in the liver.
He asked Gradishar to oversee a clinical trial. So no one would have known who the hell he was in our world. Gradishar was wary of Patrick, but impressed by the data he shared and the team of oncologists around him.
He agreed to be the principal investigator for the clinical trial of the new drug, called Abraxane. The rights to make Abraxane in the U. Some investors challenged this structure, and short sellers began to target the stock. Soon-Shiong had fired the American company conducting the trial, and finished it in Russia. Among four hundred and fifty-four breast-cancer patients enrolled in the trial, tumors shrank in thirty-three per cent of those who received Abraxane, compared with nineteen per cent of those who were given the standard treatment—in other words, an additional thirty-four women had responded to the new drug.
The survival rate was not much better for women given Abraxane than for those given paclitaxel. In addition, paclitaxel performed worse by some metrics than it had in other studies, potentially boosting Abraxane by comparison. But the tumors had shrunk. It is the nature of the American health-care system that marginal improvements can result in vast fortunes.
In early , against the expectations of the short sellers, the Food and Drug Administration approved Abraxane. Shares of American Pharmaceutical went up forty-seven per cent, and Soon-Shiong commissioned a commemorative paperweight displaying the stock chart. But in terms of its benefit in breast cancer, there is none. Gradishar agrees, to some extent. But he said that Abraxane was easier to administer, and noted that, unlike the alternative, it did not require an accompanying dose of a steroid.
He said that he regularly prescribed Abraxane to his patients. From a business perspective, the details of the clinical trial were unimportant; Abraxane now had a medical-billing code for insurance reimbursement. A article in the New York Times reported that Abraxane was selling for forty-two hundred dollars per dose. Soon-Shiong says that he had thought the cost was much lower.
Generic paclitaxel, dissolved in the castor-oil derivative, the article said, cost one-twenty-fifth as much. Doctors who administer drugs like Abraxane are permitted to receive a percentage of the price. Following additional clinical trials, the F. These developments suggest that Soon-Shiong had helped invent a better drug. In , the insurer Anthem started a program that identified effective cancer treatments, then paid doctors an additional fee to prescribe them.
When treatments were equally effective, Anthem chose the one that cost less. Abraxane made the cut only for pancreatic cancer; for breast and lung cancers, Anthem deemed paclitaxel a less expensive and equally effective drug.
Anthem still reimburses costs for Abraxane when used for any of the three cancers. In a transaction known as a reverse merger, publicly traded American Pharmaceutical issued millions of new shares to acquire privately held American BioScience—its own largest shareholder. Less than fifteen months after the merger, Soon-Shiong announced that he was splitting the companies up again.
In , Abraxis BioScience was sold to the biotech firm Celgene for nearly three billion dollars. Having started from nothing fourteen years earlier, and operating outside his medical specialty, Soon-Shiong was now worth more than seven billion dollars.
Soon-Shiong was not name-dropping; these men really are his close friends. And such a good friend. The next day, Oliver was better. Everyone brought up the basketball court. And bowling alleys. Just like a big N.
Soon-Shiong and Kobe Bryant were close. When Bryant ruptured his Achilles tendon, in , during a Lakers game, Soon-Shiong rushed to the locker room to meet him. An Achilles rupture can cause heavy swelling around the ankle, and the standard medical procedure is to wait until the swelling subsides before surgically reattaching the tendon.
But Soon-Shiong had ruptured his own Achilles playing basketball a few years earlier, and claimed to have devised a novel approach to treating the injury. He advised Bryant to have the operation immediately.
Soon-Shiong, who had not performed surgery in years and had no background in orthopedics, was in the operating room. Bryant returned to the court the following season, but never won another championship. I definitely listen. Soon-Shiong purchased his share in the Lakers in , from Magic Johnson. By this time, he had returned to U. In , he was part of an unsuccessful bid to buy the Dodgers. In , he invested in the startup Zoom, which was valued at fifty million dollars.
The company is now worth seventy billion dollars. Soon-Shiong invested in clean-tech ventures and marketed his own I. His wife, Michele, opened a movie studio, and he invested in an e-sports platform. Michele, a practicing Catholic, persuaded him to donate to several Christian charities.
Soon-Shiong grew up in the Anglican Church, and still occasionally attends services. He acquired a controlling stake in the parent company of Verity Health Systems, which ran six hospitals in California. Verity Health filed for bankruptcy in ; critics noted that the hospital chain had spent more than twenty million dollars upgrading its I.
After Verity failed, Soon-Shiong acquired control of St. Vincent Medical Center in downtown L. By , Soon-Shiong had emerged as the sole owner of the paper.
In our initial conversation, he recalled his first real job, as a teen-ager, delivering copies of the Evening Post off the back of a truck in Port Elizabeth. The L. In the nineteen-sixties, along with the rest of California, the paper tacked left. An era of liberal respectability followed: the paper won numerous Pulitzers and carried a thick classified-advertising section. By the time Soon-Shiong acquired control, the paper was much reduced. But The Times seems to always attempt to ride the middle road in its reporting - Opinion section not counting!
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