Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong
speaker
969 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Oct
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
That's correct. And, you know, you explained it perfectly, whether you have Lynch syndrome or not. Unfortunately, one in 280 Americans have Lynch syndrome. And because you have this deficient repair mechanism, there's an 80% chance higher risk of the cancers, colon cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer. But if you take the normal American or human being...
We all actually produce these incorrect, mathematically incorrect cells, and otherwise we'd all be walking around with cancer, and why not? And the reason being is because these natural killer cells that float around in your body recognize these abnormal cells, whether they're infected with COVID, a virus, or cancer, these natural killer cells would kill it.
And that's the work I started in 1990 at UCLA, and... That got evolved from my understanding of transplantation, that got involved in my work in cancer. And now, excitingly, we're on this verge, literally on this verge, because of the approval in 2024, of creating a molecule that activates what we naturally have to fight cancer, to prevent cancer.
Well, again, you hit on the right thing, because the fact that I was a transplant surgeon is why I got involved in immunology. You know, you look at immunologists and the other word called virologists and oncologists, they don't talk to each other. They're actually different disciplines.
And the fact that I got into immunology, because as I was transplanting my patient with the organ, the body was trying to reject it. But I was also a cancer surgeon. and doing these things called whipples. And as the patient has cancer, I was trying to find a way to reject that.
And what I realized is that we have in our body this yin and yang cell called the natural killer cell that's been around for hundreds of millions of years. And nobody really recognized the cell until 1970. And by 1990, I did an experiment to show that if I protect the transplanted organ from the natural killer cells, I could protect the cell.
Or if I activated the natural killer cell, I could kill the cancer. So yeah, I was in the schizophrenic position looking after patients on one hand on my transplant ward and on the other hand on my cancer ward. And realizing that the linchpin in this whole thing in your body is this natural killer cell.
So if I could activate this natural killer cell in your body with a single jab and other cells like T cells, we could drive what I call memory. And if we drive memory, we'd have a cancer vaccine.
Well, I went to medical school, I think it was age of 16, 17. And I came to this, was an MD, and I did a master's of science, fully an MD, did my entire surgical training, and ran a big research lab at the VA in Los Angeles. So this combination of curiosity and this ability or desire to do something quickly and get accomplished results as a surgeon really drove what I think I wanted to do here.
Well, look, first of all, I grew up in South Africa during apartheid. The only thing that kept me alive, literally, in terms of knowledge and what was going on was the newspaper. I literally went to the printing press. I was a newspaper boy, sat there and pulled out the first newspaper that came off the press.
And to me, that was a form of not only education, inspiration, understanding what's going on in the world, And look, I lived the American dream when we made all this, the fortune out of the work we did in pharmaceutical company, the opportunity to get a newspaper that would actually provide information, a voice to the public.
was something not as a give back, but something really would be an opportunity to really inspire and inform and also speak truth to power. So to me, that was the opportunity that I couldn't resist.
I recall very well Phil Anschutz was a partner of mine at Lakers and he came to me that night at the game and he says, you know, Patrick, I always thought you were a smart guy until today. And look, it's not a money-making business. It clearly is not.
Well, you know, look, we've put in close to maybe a billion dollars into this entire enterprise. We bought the buildings. In the first two or three years, we thought, okay, what we want to do is increase the newsroom But the platforms have been very successful in usurping the ad revenue. Without the ad revenue in the business, you can't really live by subscriptions.
You need to sort of find a way in which to support it. Which means now we need to change again. We need to figure out how we can reach audiences like the audiences you're reaching, the audiences of podcasts, the audiences of mobile, the audiences of live streaming. sports. So we're going to try that and I'll just release to you now that we're going to create an organization called L.A. Times Next.
It'll be an experiment. We'll have studios in, we do, we have studios in Los Angeles and one in Washington and one in Nashville. And we'll do podcast live streaming and hopefully create engagement to a younger audience than we currently have, and a broader audience than we currently have.
No, it really was, you know, it's come a time, really, you're right. I've been a relatively quiet person, a typical Asian, quiet, do your thing. But I just began to feel that as a newspaper owner and somebody who literally loves Los Angeles, what happened here was completely outrageous. And it is something that really I think we're going to live against for decades to come.
So it was in my mind, look, you can't, you have these climates, but the idea of the actions that you could have taken to prevent some of the destruction. was very real. So, look, I apologized very much. We had, in fact, endorsed Karen Bass.
But I had to speak out that, look, we need to move forward with real leadership, even now, of understanding operations, logistics, the dangers of the toxins, the PFAS, the lead, the lithium, and really take that not only seriously, but expeditiously.
Well, it's not surprising. We had a fire. I mean, in the Wolseley fire 2018, our place got involved, it was burned. So we knew the fires are coming, it's getting worse. And yet the brush is a regular brush. So, you know, in Laguna, they use goats. I mean, it sounds crazy, but it's not. In Europe, they use goats.
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