Biotech's Barnum And His Covid Cures

Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s radical cancer treatments made him one of the wealthiest physicians on earth. Now the master of medical marketing believes his drug therapies could defeat the “crisis of our time” — and there are plenty of reasons to think he’ll deliver more Hippocrates than hype.

- Alex Knapp

PATRICK SOON-SHIONG KNOWS when he realized that the Covid-19 pandemic was going to pose a serious threat. It was February 24, 2020, and the part-owner of the L.A. Lakers was at the Staples Center in Los Angeles for Kobe Bryant’s memorial service.

With sudden, untimely demise on his mind, he found himself thinking about the emerging pandemic.

Even though Covid-19 hadn’t yet caused a single reported death in the United States, Soon-Shiong was worried. He recalls turning around to California Governor Gavin Newsom and telling him, “We’re in trouble.”

His sense of urgency hasn’t gone away. “If I thought I was scared on February 24,” he says, “I’m more scared now.” The reason, he explains, is that “what we’ve learned is that this virus acts like cancer.” He says he has left his house only once since Bryant’s memorial, and that was to film a video about the coronavirus for the Los Angeles Times, which he bought, along with The San Diego Union-Tribune, for $600 million two years ago. “I shut myself off from the world,” he says.

And so one of the planet’s richest medical doctors, who made a $6.7 billion fortune developing breakthrough treatments for cancer and diabetes, seeks to battle the pandemic. The weapons in his arsenal: the cancer treatments he has spent the past decade and a half developing. He’s aiming them at all aspects of the coronavirus, from a vaccine to treatments for mild cases to therapies targeted toward patients on ventilators.

It’s an enormously ambitious plan from a man who has often been accused of being a hype artist.