Pledging to provide cancer patients with groundbreaking advancements in care, billionaire physician Patrick Soon-Shiong opened a state-of-the-art treatment and diagnostics center in El Segundo on Tuesday.
The Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Medicine at Mariposa — or CSS Institute, for short — will use pioneering next-generation immuno-oncology treatments for all types of cancers, officials said at a grand opening ceremony.
“I think the idea that chemotherapy is toxic and metastasis is fatal is what this institute is going to try to disprove,” Soon-Shiong said, sitting beside his wife, Michele Chan, El Segundo Mayor Suzanne Fuentes and a team of top clinicians. “We truly believe we must change for all patients with cancer this concept that high-dose chemotherapy is the standard of care.”
The facility at 2040 E. Mariposa Ave. is down the street from the future training center of the Los Angeles Lakers, a team in which Soon-Shiong holds a minority ownership interest.
Natural killer cells
Fuentes thanked Soon-Shiong and his biotech parent company, NantWorks, for choosing to open the institute in El Segundo, which is experiencing a biotech boom with companies such as Kite Pharma moving in.
“Technology developed in this city nearly 50 years ago landed a man on the moon, and more than half of the satellites and vehicles in space were manufactured in El Segundo,” Fuentes said. “While our aerospace industry continues to thrive, we are poised for a new generation of scientific advancement to once again change the world.”
Soon-Shiong, a South African-born surgeon who became the world’s wealthiest doctor after he invented the cancer drug Abraxane, told a crowd of city officials, medical professionals and reporters that the institute will blend cutting-edge research with personal care.
Specifically, patients will undergo hyper-individualized treatment designed to supercharge the body’s immune system using “natural killer cells,” virus vaccines and molecular diagnostics.
“This will be first institute in the country that will take on this ability to actually activate your immune system, transfer natural killer cells and then identify what’s driving the tumor and give you a virus injection like a flu shot,” Soon-Shiong said.
The institute will grow an “unlimited supply” of the killer cells, which are few naturally in the bloodstream.
Soon-Shiong thanked Chan for her work designing the facility’s contemporary aesthetic, which has a calming color palette to provide patients with “a sense of not only dignity, but comfort.”
Expanding treatment
The CSS Institute opening comes one week after Culver City-based NantWorks acquired a controlling stake in the Verity Health hospital chain, which operates St. Vincent Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles and St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood.
Officials said the goal is to expand the level of care at the CSS Institute to underserved patients in those hospitals.
Lennie Sender, a co-director of the institute and medical director of Hyundai Cancer Institute at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, said the new facility will be a “footprint” and “prototype” for the broader system.
“Our goal is to put close to 100 percent of our patients on trial,” Sender said. “In the country as a whole, only 3 percent of cancer patients go in trial and, in prestigious universities, 40 to 50 percent do. No one has ever achieved 100 percent.”
One of the first trials patients will be enrolled in is for a pancreatic cancer vaccine, and trials for other tumor types will follow.
“To our knowledge, these trials will be the first in the nation to combine low-dose chemo-radiotherapy with natural killer cell and fusion proteins to activate the patient’s immune system,” the institute’s surgical co-director, John Lee, said in a statement.
Sender did not say how many patients can be treated at the facility, but he said the idea is to start small.
Patients will be accepted based on their biology, he said, “not their wallet.”
