Innovative assault on cancer
He’s a biotech wizard who is using supercomputers and cloud-based technology to revolutionise cancer treatment and global healthcare. He is also the richest man in Los Angeles. He is Wits Medical School graduate and former Port Elizabeth schoolboy, Dr Pat
“LOOKS like you’re trying to boil the ocean here,” is what a tech fundi said to Los Angeles-based physician, scientist and biotech entrepreneur, Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, about his project known as the “rocket ship”.
Soon-Shiong turned his stately gaze on him and in an accent that still retains traces of his South African upbringing, despite his many years in America, said: “Let me correct you. I am boiling the ocean.”
For Soon-Shiong it’s second nature to boil the ocean or take on seemingly impossible tasks; it’s what interests him.
“I like to look for patterns, in science and life. It’s what I do,” he says.
The rocket ship is Soon-Shiong’s mega-assault on cancer that boils down to one statistic: 47 seconds.
This is the amount of time he claims it takes for the supercomputer and medical information highway that his team has developed to complete a patient’s full genomic analysis and identify the protein in their body that will respond best to a particular cancer drug treatment.
“It normally takes 11 weeks,” smiles Soon-Shiong.
He believes his approach can outrace cancer and that it needs to be rolled out to the entire American nation, and the rest of the world, with reduced medical aid costs.
He adds that it is essential to keep checking the patient’s response to the cancer drug they’ve been prescribed because as soon as you give a drug to a cancer cell, it tries to outrace the drug by spreading to other parts of the body.
Because of this, it may require a change in drug in order to outrace the disease.
At 62 years old he is a tidal-wavemaker in the medical and scientific world and it clearly suits his disposition, as he looks really good.
The former Port Elizabeth man is living the American dream – going from life in a dilapidated building in North End to being named the richest man in Los Angeles, with an estimated net worth of more than R145-billion.
But while Soon-Shiong’s empire could fund a small country, the family man, who owns a stake in the LA Lakers basketball team, has not forgotten his humble beginnings.
His parents fled China during World War 2 and sought refuge in South Africa.
Forty years ago, the family of seven lived off his father’s meagre earnings from selling groceries and household goods to the small Chinese community in North End.
They lived above his father’s general merchant store.
Since then, Soon-Shiong has experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune.
His gift for innovations and fortunes started early in his career when he was working with NASA to study the behaviour of human cells in weightless space.
He became fascinated by the role of protein molecules in cells, and it occurred to him that if healthy cells grow by ingesting protein, then it followed that protein could be used to deliver cancer-killing drugs to tumour cells.
Acting on this, in 1991 he founded his first biotech company called Abraxis BioScience, and developed a highly profitable breast cancer drug called Abraxane, which encases a tumour-fighting drug (paclitaxel) in injectable nano-packets of protein.
Abraxane was a breakthrough and a springboard to a couple of billion dollars.
In 2010, Celegne, an American biotech company, acquired Abraxis BioScience for $4.5-billion (about R54-billion).
Another part of the business that produced the blood-thinner heparin and other drugs was sold for $4.6-billion (R55-billion).
This is how it goes for Soon-Shiong and he has since developed a number of highly successful companies, always making sure he takes the media along with him on his seemingly unstoppable ride.
The launch pad for his rocket ship is the Los Angeles headquarters of his parent holding company, NantWorks – a metal and glass biotech empire in LA’s Culver City neighbourhood.
A large percentage of his 800 employees are based there. NantWorks comprises different investor groups, all with leading scientists, biologists, doctors, tech specialists, pharmacists and numbers people, working together to launch the rocket ship.
“The challenge is to go from DNA to RNA to protein to peptide to drug and we need to do this in real time,” Soon-Shiong says.
“To focus on DNA alone or make decisions based on one gene or 250 gene targets that are regarded as important out of a total of 22 000 genes is questionable.
“I believe that billions of dollars are being spent on looking at the wrong targets.
“What we need to do is look at whole genome sequencing of all 22 000 genes because the complexity lies in the protein pathways that the DNA encodes.
“This way, we can take every cancer, irrespective of its type, and convert it into its molecular profile.”
From here they can determine what is driving the cancer at the protein or proteomic level and decide which drug will work most effectively on that particular patient, instead of the traditional approach of assigning particular drugs to particular types of cancer.
He cites the example of a drug conventionally used to treat breast cancer, which he prescribed for a patient with metastatic pancreatic cancer, to great effect.
“We now have patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer who were given two or three months to live and who are still free of disease five years out.” Soon-Shiong’s detractors say his 47-second analysis is impossible; that it is more like hours or days.
Irrespective, it’s considerably faster than 11 weeks, and in aggressive types of cancer, where patients are given two to three months to live, 11 weeks is too long.
Professor Gillies McKenna, head of the department of oncology at Oxford University, says: “If he can make this work, and it will be very difficult, he’s looking at an exponential increase in the amount of data we can base decisions on.”
References: Forbes, CBS News, NHS Confederation, Larry King, YouTube, Huffington Post, University of California, and ClintonHealth Matters Conference
‘ Billions . . . are spent looking at the wrong targets