The inside story of biotech’s Barnum and his Covid cures by TheAlexKnapp
Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s radical cancer treatments made him one of the wealthiest physicians on Earth. Now the master of medical marketing believes his drug therapies could defeat “the crisis of our time.”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.
It’s an enormously ambitious plan from a man who has often been accused of being a hype artist. In an earlier incarnation, Soon-Shiong was a respected surgeon and professor at UCLA Medical School, but throughout his wildly successful entrepreneurial second act, he has been derided as more showman than scientist, thought guilty of overinflating results and taking undue credit.
Such interdisciplinary thinking may be what led to the medicine that made his fortune: Abraxane, which took an existing chemotherapy drug, Toxol, but wrapped it in protein that made it easier to deliver to tumors. It’s now used to treat advanced cases of lung, breast and pancreatic cancer. In 1998, to develop Abraxane, he purchased Fujisawa, a small, publicly traded business that sold injectable generic drugs. Soon-Shiong used its revenues to quickly move Abraxane through the regulatory process.
Other types of immunotherapies followed, ranging from purified antibodies that attack cancer to drugs that turn off the chemical switches that let tumor cells hide from the immune system. The latest advances involve CAR-T cell therapy, which first gained FDA approval in 2017 and involves genetically engineering immune cells from patients so that they attack certain targets found in tumor cells.
Former Senator Harry Reid, pictured the same month he began treatment for pancreatic cancer with Soon-Shiong, says being in remission a few months later was “kind of like a miracle.”Reid’s is an extraordinary story, as pancreatic cancer remains one of the deadliest forms of the disease. Within five years of diagnosis, it kills some 90% of patients, accounting for 7% of cancer deaths globally.
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