His Company Could Change Medicine.
Imagine visiting the doctor's office for a checkup and watching as the measurements from your blood pressure and heart rate appear instantaneously on a screen at the doctor's desk. When the doctor comes in, instead of manually comparing your vitals with a chart pasted inside a notebook, he or she looks to the screen, where the computer has done the work, instantly measuring your health data against that of thousands of other patients. what say you? WOW!!!
This is how the richest doctor in the world, Patrick Soon-Shiong, envisions the future of medicine. And the first thing he wants to change is the way we screen for, diagnose, and treat cancer. Soon-Shiong's revolutionary data-sharing system for cancer would, in theory, enable doctors and scientists to share complex information about a patient's DNA, allowing them to develop precise, individually tailored treatments that could beat the disease.
Patrick Soon-Shiong was born in Port Elizabeth, a South African city, where his parents choose to settle during the World War II that was going on throughout China and affected also Taishan – their hometown Taishan located in the Guangdong region. Descending from Chinese parents, the young Patrick Soon Shiong, graduated from University of Witwatersrand with a high score at the age of 23, continuing afterwards his medical studies at the University of British Columbia. During his residency years, Patrick Soon – Shiong was captured by the magical world of cells, regeneration techniques and organ transplants; spending his free time on research.
He received the surgeon diploma from the UCLA ( University of LA ) and in 1993 became the first surgeon in the world that was able to perform a Langerhans cell transplant for a patient suffering of Type 1 diabetes. Patrick Soon Shiong holds a large number of patents and medical studies giving a real fight in finding a cure for cancer and diabetes ( two of the most common diseases of our gengeration). Inventing “Abraxane” ( delivered from a protein ) to treat breast cancer in metastatic stage, Dr. Soon Shiong was able to bring hope and confidence for suffering patients. Nowadays, Abraxane is available in a large number of countries, and scientists are trying to use Abraxane’s principles in order to cure other types of cancer such as : lung cancer, pancreatic or even gastric cancer.
This invention was also the starting point which made Patrick Soon Shiong become a billionaire after selling his two medical companies : APP ( American Pharma Partners ) and Abraxis Science. Both of his companies were being estimated at nearly 9 billion $ and transformed him into the richest doctor in the world. Soon Shiong’s current company – NantHealth, aims to establish the highest performance in computerized tumor analysis with the help of high tech machines and DNA Sequencers. The possibility in finding a cure for cancer lies in the hands of scientists and doctors like Patrick Soon Shiong who are willing to spend all of their fortune in making the world better
transplant seaweed-covered pig cells into people with diabetes. He's an adventurous sort. After his experiments with potential cures for diabetes turned out to be too risky to pursue further, Soon-Shiong turned to cancer. In 1991, he patented the drug Abraxane, a top-selling treatment that, despite being only a slight variation on the existing cancer drug Taxol , has made him the majority of his nearly $13.3 billion innet worth. Soon-Shiong isn't just a doctor. He's also a businessman. And he's announced that he will most likely release an initial public offering, under the company name NantHealth, in early 2015. (In September, Forbes valued NantHealth at $7.7 billion.)
So far, much of the project remains in the idea phase, and some healthcare experts say they still aren't sure just what the system will actually look like. But the first week of December, Soon-Shiong rolled out the first part of the initiative, a mobile browser that would let doctors use a smartphone to look at their patients' genomes .The browser is, in a sense, a miniature version of Soon-Shiong's master plan: an integrated healthcare system that Forbes reporter Matthew Herper describes as "the closest thing that Earth has ever had to Star Trek's fabled tricorder." No, doctors won't be handing out diagnoses in seconds by running a handheld device all over your body. But if Soon-Shiong's initiative goes as planned, they could be using a smartphone — and a few other devices — to find out which particular genes are causing problems and why. Instead of waiting days for a diagnosis, you could get one in minutes. Using genetic analysis for cancer treatment isn't Soon-Shiong's idea, but scaling it to the level he envisions is.
Soon-Shiong has said he thinks our biggest challenge when it comes to cancer is that we lack the capacity to fully understand it. If we don't understand it, we can't beat it. With enough digital bandwidth, however, Soon-Shiong thinks there's hope. Doctors will be able to monitor their patients long after they leave the hospital; in a recent demo, Soon-Shiong walked potential investors through a darkened room, covered in computer screens, that would function as a command center from which a half-dozen doctors could check in on hundreds of patients remotely. One example of these remote check-ins is GlowCap, which Soon-Shiong recently purchased. GlowCap makes an $80 pill bottle that glows when patients need to take their medication and alerts doctors when they open the lid. So doctors won't just be able to tell patients to take their medicine — doctors will know when patients take it.
Soon-Shiong is launching his first pilot program of the initiative in January at Providence Health and Services, the healthcare network that recently acquired a Los Angeles hospital to which Soon-Shiong gave $85 million . Providence plans to link NantHealth's software and its genetic tests, offering them to each of the more than 25,000 cancer patients they see each year. During the pilot, Providence will most likely be outfitted like Soon-Shiong's clinic of the future, with smart blood pressure and heart-rate monitors, speedy genetic testing systems, and remote patient monitoring systems.
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