FORBES.COM OCTOBER 20 20112
THETRENDentrepreneurial second act, he has been derided
as more showman than scientist, thought guilty
of overinflating results and taking undue credit.
A few years ago, for example, he boasted about
using a breast cancer drug to treat a patient with
cervical cancer—but other groups were already
seeing similar successes. As we wrote in a 2014
cover story, “While he’s undeniably brilliant,
Soon-Shiong is equally undeniably a blowhard.”
But he also has fierce defenders of his approach
to both cancer and Covid-19, including former
Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who says the
68-year-old South Africa–born doctor “saved my
life” in 2019 by providing an experimental treat-
ment for his stage IV pancreatic cancer. Research-
ers say his methods are conceptually grounded in
good science, though the verdict on his work will
ultimately depend on results.
“We’ve been tracking and seeing an increase
in the number of these cell-based therapies,
whether they’re being repurposed from oncolo-
gy or even other disease conditions,” says Esther
Krofah, a senior analyst who monitors the clin-
ical development pipeline for Covid-19 vaccines
and therapies for the Milken Institute. A number
of them—from large pharmaceuticals and small
biotech startups alike—are going into clinical tri-
als. For many of the latter, the pandemic offers a
chance to show what their treatments can do in
a shorter time frame than cancer drugs typically
require. “For small companies, it’s a worthwhile
exercise to see if it’s successful,” Krofah says.
It may seem counterintuitive, but advances in
knowledge about the immune system, and how it
might help kill cancer, have real applications for
infectious diseases. “To me, a cancer cell and a
virus-infected cell are one and the same,” says Dr.
Wayne Marasco, an immunologist at Harvard
Medical School who is currently researching coro-
navirus treatments. The immune system, he adds,
seems to think the same way. Which is a good rea-
son to take Patrick Soon-Shiong seriously.orn in Port Elizabeth, South Af-
rica, in 1952, Soon-Shiong is no
stranger to the intersection of the
immune system, cancer and in-
fectious disease. Having gradu-
ated from medical school at age 22, he focused
his early surgical career on transplants and can-
cer, both of which involve a complex pas de deux
with the immune system. Crossing disciplines, he
says, led him to look at the “body as a system, not
a single little cell. We are a biological system.”
Such interdisciplinary thinking may be what
led to the medicine that made his fortune: Abrax-
ane, which took an existing chemotherapy drug,With sudden, untimely demise on his mind, he
found himself thinking about the emerging pan-
demic. Even though Covid-19 hadn’t yet caused a
single reported death in the United States, Soon-
Shiong was worried. He recalls turning around to
California Governor Gavin Newsom and telling
him, “We’re in trouble.”
His sense of urgency hasn’t gone away. “If I
thought I was scared on February 24,” he says,
“I’m more scared now.” The reason, he explains,
is that “what we’ve learned is that this virus acts
like cancer.” He says he has left his house only
once since Bryant’s memorial, and that was to film
a video about the coronavirus for the Los Angeles
Times, which he bought, along with The San Diego
Union-Tribune, for $600 million two years ago.
“I shut myself off from the world,” he says.
And so one of the planet’s richest medical doc-
tors, who made a $6.7 billion fortune developing
breakthrough treatments for cancer and diabe-
tes, seeks to battle the pandemic. The weapons in
his arsenal: the cancer treatments he has spent
the past decade and a half developing. He’s aim-
ing them at all aspects of the coronavirus, from a
vaccine to treatments for mild cases to therapies
targeted toward patients on ventilators.
It’s an enormously ambitious plan from a man
who has often been accused of being a hype art-
ist. In an earlier incarnation, Soon-Shiong was a
respected surgeon and professor at UCLA Med-
ical School, but throughout his wildly successfulPatrick Soon-Shiong knows
when he realized that the
Covid-19 pandemic was
going to pose a serious
threat. It was February 24,
and the part-owner of the
L.A. Lakers was at the
Staples Center in Los
Angeles for Kobe Bryant’s
memorial service.
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