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Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong (forbes.com)

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is putting his billions to work to improve health care in America, reports the LA Times. His mission is to shrink what he calls the “valley of death,” the time between the discovery of a drug and saving a life.

The son of a Chinese practitioner who immigrated to South Africa during WW11, he grew up in apartheid South Africa and earned his medical degree in Johannesburg. He joined UCLA as at the age of 31 and developed a technique for inserting islet cells into the pancreas to treat diabetes.

Soon-Shiong founded two companies to pursue promising treatments for cancer, diabetes and other devastating diseases. Abraxane, a blockbuster chemotherapy drug, put him on the map and turned him into a billionaire. This nanotech drug was praised for travelling safely through the bloodstream and killing cancerous cells in a concentrated rush, with the ability to be taken in high doses with fewer side effects. Researchers reported that Abraxane was more effective than Taxol, an older medicine, for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer.

According to Forbes Magazine, Soon-Shiong’s net worth is estimated at $5.5- billion and he is #87 on the World’s Billionaires List. He has devoted himself to using his money to bridge the gap between science and medicine as well as erase the disparities in health care between the rich and the poor. He has already spent $135- million dollars to renovate St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica and plans to spend $100- million dollars to underwrite efforts to reopen Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital.

“On a personal level, my concern is how we pursue care and drug discovery and all that today is going to lead us down a path of diminishing returns.”

To address these concerns, The Wireless Health Institute was established last year. The institute consists of a community of UCLA experts that include engineering, medicine, nursing, pharmacology and other disciplines.

He calls this the “medical information highway” a computer grid that allows patients and doctors to exchange medical information so they are up to date on the newest treatments available.

“The science of molecular medicine is evolving so rapidly that doctors can’t keep up and the only way for them to have decision support is to have access to information on real time. And they need to have that information at the point of care.”

Dr. Soon Shiong gives examples of other wireless health innovations that protect patients in real time. Sensors that detect foot ulcers before diabetics realize they are getting them, “smart” canes that use accelerometers to notify caregivers that a patient is soon to fall and a wireless len-less microscope that can use a phone’s camera for some diagnostics.

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Tags: Abraxane, Abraxis BioScience, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, Taxol

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 9:27 am and is filed under Doctors In The Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.