PATRICK SOON-SHIONG

Patrick Soon-Shiong was born in 1952 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, the son of Chinese immigrants who ran a small grocery store. He was among the first Chinese-South Africans to graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand medical school — a meaningful achievement in apartheid-era South Africa where institutional access was tightly controlled.

He moved to the United States in the 1970s, trained as a transplant surgeon at UCLA, and completed a fellowship at the University of British Columbia.

The business pivot came with American BioScience, a pharmaceutical manufacturer he founded that grew into American Pharmaceutical Partners. He took it public and eventually sold it to Fresenius Kabi in 2008 for roughly $4.6 billion.

But the bigger story was Abraxane. Paclitaxel had been an effective cancer drug for years, but the solvent used to deliver it — called Cremophor — caused severe allergic reactions.

Soon-Shiong asked a simple question almost nobody else thought to ask: what if the solvent is the problem, not the drug? He replaced Cremophor with albumin, a protein the body already produces naturally.

The drug became more tolerable, more effective in some cancers, and FDA-approved in 2005. Celgene bought the company that owned Abraxane, Abraxis BioScience, for $2.9 billion in 2010.

Since then he built NantWorks — a group of companies attacking cancer immunotherapy, healthcare IT, and AI-driven clinical decision support. NantHealth and ImmunityBio (formerly NantKwest) are both publicly traded.

Neither has performed the way he forecast at launch. In 2018 he added media to his portfolio, buying the LA Times and San Diego Union-Tribune from Tribune Publishing for $500 million.

He is also a part-owner of the LA Lakers — a team he first served as team physician starting in 1989.

Abraxis BioScience: Built around Abraxane, the reformulated cancer drug that replaced a toxic solvent with albumin. Celgene bought it for $2.9 billion in 2010 — the defining exit of his career and proof that improving drug delivery, not just inventing new drugs, can create enormous value.

ImmunityBio (formerly NantKwest): A publicly traded biotech working on cancer immunotherapy using natural killer cells. Has consumed significant capital in clinical programs and faces persistent skepticism from investors who want commercial revenue, not just clinical milestones.

NantHealth: A healthcare IT company built to deliver real-time clinical decision support to hospitals. Went public in 2016 at $16 per share.

Has traded well below that price for most of its existence. The vision was sound.

The commercial adoption was slower than anyone projected.

Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune: Purchased from Tribune Publishing in 2018 for $500 million. He pledged editorial independence and a technology-forward newsroom.

The LA Times has since undergone multiple rounds of layoffs. The financial challenge of sustaining journalism at scale remains unsolved.

NantWorks: The umbrella holding company for all his ventures. Think of it as a personal research empire with ambitions that span cancer treatment, AI infrastructure, and healthcare data.

Soon-Shiong is a builder and concentrator, not a portfolio diversifier. He does not manage a fund or place bets in others' companies — he founds them, takes them public, and bets his own capital on his convictions.

Every venture connects to the same core thesis: medicine fails patients because it lacks real-time data and because drugs are poorly delivered. Fix the infrastructure and the outcomes improve.

With Abraxane, the fix was changing a solvent. With ImmunityBio, it is training natural killer cells to find and destroy tumors.

With NantHealth, it is routing genomic data to clinical decision systems in real time. The method starts from biology: understand the problem at a molecular level, identify where the prevailing approach is wrong, and fix it.

The commercial risk is that his timelines have repeatedly been longer than public markets tolerate. He concentrates capital, accepts long runways, and does not change direction when the market disagrees.

He generated more than $7 billion from pharmaceutical exits in a single decade. First, American Pharmaceutical Partners sold to Fresenius Kabi in 2008 for roughly $4.6 billion.

Then Celgene paid $2.9 billion in 2010 for Abraxis BioScience, the company built around Abraxane. The Abraxane win was particularly elegant because the underlying insight was simple: everyone had accepted the toxic solvent as the cost of treatment, and he stopped and asked if the solvent itself was the problem.

It was. Replacing it with albumin made the drug more tolerable and more effective in some cancer types.

FDA approval came in 2005. The exit came five years later.

That is what it looks like when a scientist understands something the market has not yet priced.

NantHealth went public in 2016 with a $16 IPO price and a compelling pitch: real-time clinical decision support for hospitals, powered by genomic sequencing and AI. The vision was genuine.

The problem was that hospitals are among the slowest institutions in the world to adopt new IT systems. Sales cycles run three to five years.

Procurement involves multiple committees. Budgets are constrained by insurance reimbursement rates that nobody can control.

He had built the technology correctly but dramatically underestimated how long it would take healthcare institutions to change their behavior. NantHealth never recovered its IPO valuation.

The lesson: in healthcare IT, great technology is table stakes. Change management is the actual product.

He says he does not optimize for money — he optimizes for problems worth solving. His guiding principles: invest only in what you understand at a molecular or systems level, accept that biology and healthcare run on long timelines, and do not be deterred by public market skepticism when you believe the science is right.

He also believes in civic responsibility as a form of investment. The LA Times purchase was not a financial calculation.

He described it as an obligation — local journalism matters enough to warrant losing money on it. Whether that conviction can be financially sustained is the open question of his post-Abraxane career.

He is married to Michele Chan, an actress who has remained active in philanthropy and her own ventures. They have two children.

The family is visible in Los Angeles civic life — Michele appears frequently at high-profile events while Patrick maintains a lower personal profile despite owning the city's flagship newspaper. He has spoken often about his parents, who ran a grocery store under apartheid, as the foundational influence on his work ethic and his belief that education is the only reliable path out of limited circumstances.

He earned his MBBCh from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, notable in part because he was among the first Chinese-South Africans admitted under apartheid. He trained as a transplant surgeon at UCLA, then completed a fellowship at the University of British Columbia.

He has never pursued an MBA and has never seemed interested in one. His medical training gives him a level of hands-on scientific credibility that most pharmaceutical executives simply do not have.

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