At 2020 deadline, progress in Patrick Soon-Shiong’s ‘cancer moonshot’ is hard to find
In 2016, the biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong set himself a deadline: By 2020, he would transform the fight against cancer.
With the help of a coalition of big-name companies, researchers, and physicians, Soon-Shiong vowed, he would enroll 20,000 cancer patients in clinical trials and develop an effective vaccine to treat the disease.
Four years later, independent medical researchers say they’ve heard virtual radio silence from Soon-Shiong’s initiative. And a review by STAT of clinical trial listings, research presentations, and press releases suggests the effort has fallen far short of its major goals.
Soon-Shiong and his team plan to “release results” next week related to his Cancer Breakthroughs 2020 initiative, according to his spokesperson, Jen Hodson. The announcement will take place during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco — the same venue where Soon-Shiong unveiled the initiative in 2016, then called the Cancer MoonShot 2020.
Hodson declined to disclose details about plans for the presentation, or to answer questions more broadly about Soon-Shiong’s initiative.
Even so, there are signs that progress has been slow. The initiative appears to have signed up only a small fraction of the 20,000 patients it aspired to enroll in clinical trials, based on publicly available data. At most, it could conceivably hit about a quarter of that target. But it’s likely that the final number
