Patrick Soon-Shiong on a Cancer Cure | Interview

This is an interview, not a documentary film, and it belongs in the library for one reason. The man answering Megyn Kelly’s questions is a transplant surgeon who built and sold a multibillion dollar drug company, and he is arguing that the tools to treat certain cancers by activating the patient’s own immune system already exist. The Patrick Soon-Shiong cancer cure argument is not that a miracle is coming. It is that the science is further along than the public realizes, and that the approval machinery standing between that science and the patients who need it has become the bottleneck. Whether you accept his framing or not, this is a rare hour of plain language from someone who has worked every layer of the system, from the operating table to the boardroom to the newsroom.

The Surgeon Who Built a Biotech Empire

Patrick Soon-Shiong was born in South Africa to Chinese immigrant parents and trained as a surgeon before moving to the United States. His early career was clinical and demanding, centered on transplant surgery, oncology, and complex pancreatic and abdominal operations. That matters to how he talks. He is not a venture capitalist who discovered medicine through a spreadsheet. He spent years with his hands inside patients who were dying of the disease he now spends his money trying to defeat, and that experience runs underneath everything he says in this conversation.

He moved from clinical practice into research and drug development, founding APP Pharmaceuticals, which specialized in injectable drugs, and later Abraxis BioScience. At Abraxis he helped develop Abraxane, a chemotherapy drug used in breast, lung and pancreatic cancer. In 2010 Abraxis was sold to Celgene for close to three billion dollars. That sale is the financial foundation of everything that followed, including NantWorks, his network of companies built around precision medicine, immunotherapy, and the integration of artificial intelligence with patient data.

What the Patrick Soon-Shiong Cancer Cure Actually Proposes

The core idea he defends in this interview is a shift in target. Conventional chemotherapy attacks the tumor directly and damages a great deal of healthy tissue on the way. The approach pursued through ImmunityBio, one of the key NantWorks subsidiaries, aims instead at the patient’s immune system, working to activate the natural killer cells and T cells that are supposed to recognize and destroy malignant cells but have been suppressed or evaded by the cancer itself. In that model the drug is not the weapon. The patient is the weapon, and the drug is what takes the muzzle off.

Soon-Shiong presents this as a coherent scientific program rather than a single product, and he is direct about why he thinks it has been slow to reach people. He argues that the research establishment is organized around incremental improvements to existing chemotherapy, that funding and trial design follow that organization, and that a treatment which does not fit the established template has a harder path regardless of what the data shows. Mainstream oncology does not dispute that immunotherapy is real and important, since checkpoint inhibitors and CAR T therapies are now standard in several cancers. The disagreement is narrower and sharper. It is about how much evidence a specific protocol needs before it reaches patients, and about whether the current standard of proof saves more lives than it costs.

The Fight With the Approval System

The most useful part of this conversation is the walkthrough of what getting a treatment approved actually involves. Soon-Shiong describes the process as a sequence of gates, each requiring time, capital and a specific kind of evidence, and each designed for a world where the question is whether a new chemical is safe and marginally better than the old one. His complaint is that a therapy built around the immune system raises different questions and produces different signals, and that forcing it through a framework built for something else obscures rather than clarifies what it does.

This is contested territory and the counterposition deserves a fair hearing. Regulators and many oncologists hold that the slow, expensive gates exist precisely because the history of cancer medicine is littered with treatments that looked extraordinary in early results and did nothing, or did harm, once tested properly against a control group. Enthusiasm from a treatment’s own developer is the weakest form of evidence available, and that is true no matter how distinguished the developer is. Watch this interview as one very well credentialed participant’s account of a real and unresolved argument, not as a verdict on it.

Why a Cancer Researcher Bought a Newspaper

In 2018 Soon-Shiong purchased the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, positioning himself as a steward of independent journalism at a moment of severe disruption in the industry. He now sits as chief executive of the Los Angeles Times Media Group while running a biotech network, and that combination is exactly why this interview reads differently than a standard science segment. A man who believes his medical work has been filtered by institutional gatekeeping went out and bought a piece of the filter. His career follows a consistent pattern of identifying a chokepoint and then buying or building his way past it, first in drug manufacturing, then in data, then in media.

Why This Conversation Is Worth Your Hour

You will not leave this interview knowing whether the Patrick Soon-Shiong cancer cure claims hold up. That question will be settled by trial data over years, not by an on camera exchange. What you will leave with is a much clearer picture of how cancer treatment actually gets built and approved in the United States, who pays for it, which incentives shape which research gets funded, and why a treatment can exist in a laboratory for a long time before it reaches a clinic. Kelly presses him on the effectiveness question and does not simply take the pitch, which makes the exchange more useful than a friendly profile would be.

This interview was featured in the MONTHLY REPORT April 2026 Volume IX Chapter IV under Health Watch. Explore more titles in the MUST WATCH Documentary Library.