1. Patrick Soon-Shiong was born on July 29,1952 and is a South African and American businessman, investor, medical researcher, and transplant surgeon.
42 Facts About Patrick Soon-Shiong
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Patrick Soon-Shiong is the inventor of the drug Abraxane, which is used for lung, breast, and pancreatic cancer.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong 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.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong has been called the richest man in Los Angeles and one of the wealthiest doctors in the world.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong was born in Port Elizabeth in the Union of South Africa in present-day South Africa, to Chinese immigrant parents who fled China during the Japanese occupation in World War II.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong's parents were Hakka originally from Meixian District in Guangdong province.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong completed his medical internship at Johannesburg's General Hospital.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong received research awards from the American College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the American Association of Academic Surgery.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong immigrated to the United States and began surgical training at University of California, Los Angeles, and became a board-certified surgeon in 1984.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong joined UCLA Medical School in 1983 and served on that faculty until 1991, as a transplant surgeon.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong was a visiting professor at Imperial College, London, in 2011.
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In 2010, in partnership with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, Patrick Soon-Shiong established the Healthcare Transformation Institute.
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In early 2016, Patrick Soon-Shiong launched the National Immunotherapy Coalition to encourage rival pharmaceutical companies to work together to test combinations of cancer-fighting drugs.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong has met with Joe Biden to discuss approaches to fighting cancer, including conducting genomic sequencing of 100,000 patients to create a large database of potential genetic factors.
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In May 2017, Patrick Soon-Shiong was appointed by House Speaker Paul Ryan to the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee, a committee established by the 21st Century Cures Act.
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In December 2021, Patrick Soon-Shiong shared pre-clinical results of giving two different vaccine platforms and showed beneficial T cell levels using an adenovirus and mRNA technology.
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Beyond his medical and scientific career, Patrick Soon-Shiong was a businessman in the late 1990s and an investor since the early 2010s.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased Fujisawa, which sold injectable generic drugs, in 1998.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong later founded Abraxis BioScience, with which he would develop Abraxane, which took an existing chemotherapy drug, paclitaxel, and wrapped it in protein that made it easier to deliver to tumors.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong became rich after it was approved by regulators and entered the market.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong founded NantHealth in 2007 to provide fiber-optic, cloud-based data infrastructure to share healthcare information.
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In 2013, Patrick Soon-Shiong became an early investor in Zoom, the video conferencing company.
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In September 2014, NantWorks LLC, a company headed by Patrick Soon-Shiong, invested $2.5 million in AccuRadio.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong did not push forward with FDA approval as the agreement dictated, and instead allowed critical patents and deadlines to lapse, presumably due to his financial interest in another drug that would compete with Cynviloq.
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In July 2015, Patrick Soon-Shiong initiated an IPO for NantKwest that represented the highest value biotech IPO in history, at a market value of $2.6 billion.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong is a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council.
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In 2019, Patrick Soon-Shiong became an investor in Directa Plus, a European-based graphene-based technology company, where he owns 28 percent of the company.
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In early 2021, Patrick Soon-Shiong merged publicly-traded NantKwest with privately-held ImmunityBio.
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Also that year, Patrick Soon-Shiong announced a new investment of $29 million in a biorenewables company called NantRenewables at SeaPoint in Savannah, Georgia.
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In January 2022, Patrick Soon-Shiong opened a new manufacturing facility and campus in Cape Town, South Africa with President Ramaphosa.
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In 2020, Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the editorial board from making any endorsement in the Democratic presidential primaries, overruling its intended endorsement of Elizabeth Warren; the paper did endorse Biden in the general election.
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In July 2023, Patrick Soon-Shiong sold the San Diego Union-Tribune to MediaNews Group.
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In October 2024, as the Los Angeles Times editorial board was preparing to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 United States presidential election, Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the newspaper from making any endorsement.
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In November 2024, the Los Angeles Times fired its entire editorial board, and Patrick Soon-Shiong announced plans to replace them with a new team.
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In December 2024, Patrick Soon-Shiong announced that the Los Angeles Times would employ an AI-powered bias meter into the newspaper's coverage.
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The announcement came after Patrick Soon-Shiong expressed his desire to include more conservative voices in the paper's opinion section, following Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election.
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In January 2025, Soon-Shiong was accused of diverting the meaning of a Los Angeles Times op-ed which opposed the confirmation of Robert F Kennedy Jr.
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The Foundation paid some employees from Patrick Soon-Shiong's companies, which is a potentially inappropriate use of charitable funds to cover unrelated business overhead.
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The foundation contributed a quarter of a $12 million donation by Patrick Soon-Shiong-controlled organizations to the University of Utah to set up a gene mapping project.
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Control over the grant specifications was given over to Patrick Soon-Shiong's donating organizations, and his NantHealth company was awarded the $10 million contract.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong has committed to the Giving Pledge and has pledged to give away at least half of his wealth to philanthropy.