Patrick Soon-Shiong

Patrick Soon-Shiong (born July 29, 1952) is an American transplant surgeon, billionaire businessman, bioscientist, and media proprietor.

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 healthcare, biotech, and artificial intelligence 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 nonprofit 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 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.

Soon-Shiong joined UCLA Medical School in 1983 and served on that faculty until 1991, as a transplant surgeon.

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.

He has acquired United States citizenship.

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."

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 purchased Fujisawa, which sold injectable generic drugs, in 1998.

He used its revenues to develop Abraxane, which took an existing chemotherapy drug, Taxol, and wrapped it in protein that made it easier to deliver to tumors.

He was able to quickly move it through the regulatory process and made his fortune with this medicine.

Soon-Shiong founded NantHealth in 2007 to provide fiber-optic, cloud-based data infrastructure to share healthcare information.

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.

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.

, Soon-Shiong is estimated by Forbes to have a net worth of US$11.5 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, Union of South Africa (modern day South Africa), to Chinese immigrant parents who fled from China during the Japanese occupation in World War II.

His parents were Hakka originally from Meixian District in Guangdong province.

His ancestral surname is Wong (黃).

Soon-Shiong graduated 4th out of his class of 200 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.

Soon-Shiong later founded Abraxis BioScience (maker of the drug, Abraxane), a company he sold to Celgene in 2010 in a cash-and-stock deal valued at over $3 billion.

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.

Soon-Shiong served as a visiting professor at Imperial College, London, in 2011.

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."

It owns a number of technology companies in the fields of healthcare, commerce, digital entertainment as well as a venture capital firm in the healthcare, education, science, and technology sectors.

Particular technologies include machine vision, object and voice recognition, low power semiconductors, supercomputing, and networking technologies.

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 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.