Monday, November 21, 2016

Patrick Soon-Shiong Meets with Trump: Biotech, Genomics, and the Trump Administration

The weekend of November 20, biotech industry leader Patrick Soon-Shiong had dinner with both President-Elect Trump and Vice President-Elect Michael Pence.
  • For coverage at John Carroll's blog Endpoints, here
  • For coverage at the Trump website GreatAgain, here.
  • For Dr. Soon-Shiong's tweet, here.
GreatAgain writes,
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong joined President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Pence for dinner this evening. 
The renowned doctor has appeared on the cover of Forbes for his advances in finding a cure for cancer. They discussed innovation in the area of medicine and national medical priorities that need to be addressed in our country.

Soon-Shiong's Nanthealth, which IPO'd in June 2016, aims to provide a range of services for health innovation from digital to genomic.  One is its panomic oncology test GPS, which assesses DNA, RNA, and protein.   Nanthealth has been discussing the potential of GPS to assign best-odds cytotoxic chemotherapies (here).   

Like all genomic tests performed on cancer tissue biopsied in a hospital inpatient or outpatient setting, such tests collide with Medicare's bizarre 14-day rule, delaying testing, treatment, and reimbursement for Medicare beneficiaries with cancer.   Maybe in the coming months the genomics and biopharma industry can get get the President's ear on this, for a quick action point that could make a real difference for innovation and health outcomes.

_____

For a March 2016 interview with Soon-Shiong on the podcast Healthcare Tech Talk, here (and here).  His Wikipedia page, here.   For a 2014 profile on 60 Minutes, here.  For a 2014 Forbes cover story, here.  For a November 2016 Fast Company profile, here.

Coverage of the Trump/Soon-Shiong meeting at CBS-Los Angeles here, STAT here.

John Carroll recently blogged on the unusual overlap of multiple uses of oncology "moonshot" by multiple industry and policy stakeholders, here (see also here and here).