Patrick Soon-Shiong

Patrick Soon-Shiong (born July 29, 1952) is a South African and American businessman, investor, medical researcher, and transplant surgeon. He is the inventor of the drug Abraxane, which is used for lung, breast, and pancreatic cancer. He has received US FDA approval for a new class of immunotherapy drug called Anktiva in non-muscle invasive bladder cancer in 2024. Soon-Shiong is the founder of NantWorks, a network of healthcare, biotech, and artificial intelligence startups; an adjunct professor of surgery and executive director of the Wireless Health Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles; and a visiting professor at Imperial College London and Dartmouth College. He is currently Executive Chairman, Global Chief Medical & Technology Officer at ImmunityBio. Dr. Soon-Shiong currently holds over 850 worldwide patents.

Soon-Shiong is the chairman of Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation, a non-profit foundation. He has been a minority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers since 2010, and since June 2018, he has been the owner and executive chairman of the Los Angeles Times.

Soon-Shiong's net worth is US$12.0 billion as of 2025 according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes. He has been called the richest man in Los Angeles and one of the wealthiest doctors in the world.

Soon-Shiong was born in Port Elizabeth in the Union of South Africa in present-day South Africa, to Chinese immigrant parents who fled China during the Japanese occupation in World War II. His parents were Hakka originally from Meixian District in Guangdong province. His ancestral surname is Huang (黃).

Soon-Shiong graduated from the University of Witwatersrand, where he was fourth in his class of 189 and received a bachelor's degree in medicine (MBBCh) at age 23. He completed his medical internship at Johannesburg's General Hospital. He then studied at the University of British Columbia, where he earned a master's degree in 1979, and an M.D from University of Witwatersrand. He received research awards from the American College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the American Association of Academic Surgery.

He immigrated to the United States and began surgical training at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and became a board-certified surgeon in 1984. Soon-Shiong is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Canada) and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He is a United States citizen.

Soon-Shiong served on the faculty of the UCLA Medical School from 1983 until 1991 as a transplant surgeon. Between 1984 and 1987, he served as an associate investigator at the Center for Ulcer Research and Education. Soon-Shiong performed the first whole-pancreas transplant done at UCLA. He developed and first performed the experimental Type 1 diabetes-treatment known as encapsulated-human-islet transplant, and the "first pig-to-man islet-cell transplant in diabetic patients." After a period in private industry, he returned to UCLA in 2009, serving as a professor of microbiology, immunology, molecular genetics, and bioengineering. Soon-Shiong was a visiting professor at Imperial College, London, in 2011.

In 2010, in partnership with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, Soon-Shiong established the Healthcare Transformation Institute (HTI). HTI's mission is to promote a shift in health care in the United States by better integrating the three now separate domains of medical science, health delivery, and healthcare finance.