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Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong speaks during the formal renaming of Windber Medical Center on Oct. 8, 2016.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is all smiles after sharing a funny moment with hospital President and CEO Tom Kurtz (seated) on Thursday, September 8, 2016, during the official renaming of Chan Soon-Shiong Medical Center at Windber and Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine at Windber.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong
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Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong speaks during the formal renaming of Windber Medical Center on Oct. 8, 2016.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is all smiles after sharing a funny moment with hospital President and CEO Tom Kurtz (seated) on Thursday, September 8, 2016, during the official renaming of Chan Soon-Shiong Medical Center at Windber and Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine at Windber.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong
WINDBER, Pa. – Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong sees the work done by doctors and scientists at his facilities in Windber as complementary to his global mission to push the boundaries of medical research, develop innovative treatment options and save lives – even when the adversaries are invasive breast cancer and other killer diseases.
Soon-Shiong is a leader in the treating of diseases by activating T-cells – parts of the body’s immune system that exist to attack foreign particles such as cancer cells – and a champion of pursuing emerging technology, including artificial intelligence, to benefit health research and medical outcomes.
And he pledged to grow and maintain the latest in research and treatment – including clinical trials in the future – at the small, rural Windber facilities.
“You prove that you can actually have state-of-the-art, 21st-century medicine and maintain quality in a rural hospital in this country,” he said in an exclusive interview with The Tribune-Democrat for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
“That becomes a proxy for people in third-world countries, little, low-income countries such as in Africa, so they could leapfrog in the same way – that it’s all connected in that way. It’s great teaching that it’s not the size, but the quality.”
Soon-Shiong took on the role of financial benefactor of the Windber medical complex – including Chan Soon-Shiong Medical Center, Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine and the Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center – in 2015. He does not own the Windber centers, but rather provides financial backing through his foundation and serves as the hospital’s board chairman.
He came to the local market wearing the label of the world’s wealthiest medical professional thanks to transplant and immunology breakthroughs at the University of California, Los Angeles; more than 500 patents, including for the chemotherapy drug Abraxane; and his drive to make cell-level treatment the standard for cancer patients.
At Windber, he added to his network the largest breast cancer tissue repository in the world, an institute with ties to Department of Defense research and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and the Murtha breast care center, which was designed to create a warm patient atmosphere for mammograms and cancer treatments.
The research and breast care centers are affiliated with Chan Soon-Shiong Medical Center.
The hospital’s recent accolades include ranking among the 20 top recommended hospitals in Pennsylvania by Becker’s Hospital Review, earning a five-star rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and being named a top-100 hospital by Fortune Magazine.
“That really inspired me to say, ‘Here’s a rural hospital that detailed translational science in medicine and really changed how you treat patients,’ ” Soon-Shiong said. “And I think Windber can be a reflection of that. They have an incredible ongoing strong relationship with Walter Reed … and one of the best biobanks in the country, doing incredible research at the genomics level for cancer – and yet are maintaining the hospital at not only the state-of-the-art level … but high quality.”
Tom Kurtz, president and CEO of the Windber health centers, called Soon-Shiong’s impact through resources, connections and leadership “enormous.”
“He has a passion for medicine, a compassion for the individual patient and a commitment to making meaningful change in the health care system,” Kurtz said. “Dr. Soon-Shiong not only embraces change, he expects change. He wants us to be innovative.”
Soon-Shiong is the son of Chinese parents who moved to South Africa, where he was born and raised during apartheid, according to biographies published by Forbes and the Los Angeles Times, where he is the newspaper’s executive chairman.
In 2010, he founded the health and technology company NantWorks after selling two other firms – American Pharmaceutical Partners and Abraxis BioScience – for a combined $8 billion.
The Chan Soon-Shiong centers in Windber – under the Chan Soon-Shiong NantHealth Foundation – are part of his global network of public and private medical operations that also includes a COVID-19 vaccine facility in South Africa.
Scientists at the Windber institute study cancer at the gene and protein levels – a perfect fit for Soon-Shiong’s work to confront cancer through immunotherapy.
“The Windber research institute has always wanted to do translational medicine,” Kurtz said, noting that the approach brings together science, education, advancements in treatment and improving community wellness. “Our relationships with the Department of Defense and Walter Reed have given us the tools and provided the staffing to do that.”
Soon-Shiong is part-owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, so it isn’t surprising that he calls his treatment the “trifecta” – or, another sports term, the “triple play.”
Greatly simplified, this works when the natural killer cell, the T-cell and the dendritic cell – in sequence – identify cancer, activate an immune response and then take out the invasive disease cells.
“The way we’ve addressed it … a treatment that is ubiquitous across all cancers, including breast cancer,” he said. “So we’ve gone across bladder cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer – and the concept here is to activate your own body’s immune system – called the natural killer cell. What’s exciting is when you do that, we find, regardless of the cancer type, that you get complete remissions.”
He said one of the prime examples is bladder cancer, with traditional treatments that he said often “fail within a year, and the patient is left with the option to have the entire bladder removed, which is a horrific procedure with a high mortality rate, a high morbidity rate.”
But with T-cell treatment injected into the bladder, patients can experience “70% complete remission rate for more than two to three years, and in some patients, eight or nine years,” Soon-Shiong said. “This is the first evidence that activating your immune system, what we call that the NANT Cancer Vaccine, is a real phenomenon that could address all cancers, including breast cancer.”
He said such treatments have been shown to be effective even against the harshest of breast cancers, including metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (mTNBC).
“We’ve done trials with patients with triple-negative breast cancer and have seen them achieve complete remission, for patients compared to other therapies,” he said, “so, yes, we are on the right path. And this is where we want to leap from.”
He added: “Our vision is that high-dose chemotherapy and high-dose radiation should be a thing of the past. Next-generation immunotherapy – what we call the ‘trifecta’ or the ‘triple offense’ – the natural killer cell, the T-cell and the dendritic cell – we now have activated and validated through multiple clinical trials.”
Soon-Shiong’s team developed a T-cell COVID-19 vaccine, that is manufactured at his facility in South Africa. He said the T-cell injection is more effective than traditional antibody coronavirus drugs, especially for patients susceptible to the “long-haul” form of the virus.
“I’ve been saying since the onset of COVID in 2020 that our approach has been wrong, that having an antibody-based vaccine is merely going to exacerbate the mutation change of this virus,” he said. “Unless we can kill the virus, clear the virus from the body using T-cells, you will not stop transmission and you may end up with long COVID.”
Soon-Shiong cited a new study showing that 13% of patients develop long-term COVID – “a devastating disease” – and tracking “activity where the T-cells have been suppressed by COVID. So, we have created a vaccine in patients that has shown that it can generate a T-cell against COVID that lasts over a year.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 1,315 U.S. deaths involving COVID-19 and other factors such as influenza for the week ending Sept. 23, and nearly 500 deaths directly attributed to the coronavirus – down from earlier in the month and well off the COVID-peak levels of 2020-21.
“The good news is that there has been a reduction in deaths, but there’s still significant number of deaths,” Soon-Shiong said. “When you look at the numbers, if you had a plane crash on a daily basis, it would be big news – but, right now, it’s almost normal.”
Soon-Shiong said getting his COVID vision in front of U.S. health leaders has been a challenge, so his vaccines are produced and distributed only in South Africa – for now.
“Change is difficult,” he said. “Changing assumptions is difficult. We’re working hard to convince the (CDC) that’s what’s needed.
“In South Africa in late-stage clinical trials, we’ve demonstrated this ability to generate T-cells, not only in healthy patients, but in patients that were previously infected, patients with previous vaccines and even in patients with HIV.”
The next step at Windber would be clinical trials, which could elevate the local facilities’ impact on treatment and pharmaceuticals.
Soon-Shiong said that while the cancer research is in place to support local clinical trials, facilities and training must be developed.
“Training, infrastructure, clinical trial management – monitoring patients – and having the sufficient medical- clinical operations group that understands clinical trials, and then to train the investigators with regard to cell therapy,” he said. “And that is happening as we speak.”
Without providing a timeline, Soon-Shiong said the concept is achievable, likely in collaboration with other medical organizations such as Walter Reed.
“That is very realistic,” he said. “Again, the infrastructure needs and the ability to monitor patients and deliver second-generation immunotherapy research and cell therapy – that’s what we’re working through – to become a second- generation cell therapy and immunotherapy trial site. That is still very much in progress.”
Soon-Shiong said the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into medical treatment is beyond theory and now in practice – including the use of an algorithm that helps doctors identify specific types of cancer.
“We’ve been pursuing AI in health care for 10 years, in genomics and sequencing,” he said. “We’ve now created something called ‘digital pathology’ – which I’ll bring to Windber, by the way – where just through the microscope, with a thing called ‘machine vision,’ we can diagnose whether the cancer is there or not and assist people.”
The software has other applications in health care, he said.
“We can actually predict through EKG wavelengths whether a patient is in imminent danger of cardiac failure,” Soon-Shiong said. “So the opportunity for AI is very, very real. I don’t call it ‘artificial intelligence.’ I call it ‘augmented intelligence.’ So that’s something I think has finally come to maturity.”
Chip Minemyer is the publisher of The Tribune-Democrat and The Times-News of Cumberland, Md. He can be reached at 814-532-5111. Follow him on Twitter @MinemyerChip.
Local medical facilities are joining the group of organizations led by a famous California cancer doctor.
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