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Patrick Soon-Shiong
npg 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
Straight talk with Patrick Soon-Shiong
Patrick Soon-Shiong has only one mode of thinking: big. The South Africa-born surgeon-scientist pioneered islet transplants to treat diabetes and nanoparticle drug delivery for cancer, and he has founded two multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical firmsAbraxis BioScience,now part of Celgene Corporation headquartered in New Jersey, and American Pharmaceutical Partners, acquired by the German company Fresenius Kabi. Hes now setting his sights on transforming the entire US biomedical system from bench to bedside, starting with a modern, high-speed data network. Together with his wife, Michele Chan, theLos Angelesbased entrepeneur founded the Chan Soon-Shiong (CSS) Institute for Advanced Health in early 2011. The project has already spent a quarter of a billion dollars, much of it Soon-Shiongs.
With locations thus far at the Saint Johns Health Center in Santa Monica, California and the University of Arizona College of Medicinein Phoenix, the CSS Institute aims to network everyone with a stakein health carefrom bench researchers to clinicians and patientsto insurersso that they can collaborate using easily-shared health records, medical images, genomes and any other kind of data. The Institute is in the midst of launching its first major project, the Cancer Knowledge Alliance Network. But thats just the beginning. Amber Dance sat down with Soon-Shiong to talk about how uniting physicians and scientists will surmount...