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Abstract
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 firms-Abraxis BioScience, now part of Celgene Corporation headquartered in New Jersey, and American Pharmaceutical Partners, acquired by the German company Fresenius Kabi. He's 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, the Los Angeles-based 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-Shiong's.With locations thus far at the Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California and the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix, the CSS Institute aims to network everyone with a stake in health care-from bench researchers to clinicians and patients to insurers-so 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 that's just the beginning. Amber Dance sat down with Soon-Shiong to talk about how uniting physicians and scientists will surmount the most pressing challenges in biomedicine and cancer research.