Celgene bets $25M on Soon-Shiong's personalized medicine play

Patrick Soon-Shiong

Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is working to marry Big Data and cancer treatment, and his old friends at Celgene ($CELG) have again stepped in to help out, investing $25 million in NantHealth, a cloud-based oncology brain trust.

NantHealth bills itself as a clinical operating system, a database of thousands of trials and genomic studies that Soon-Shiong believes can at once help physicians prescribing oncology therapies and developers cooking up cancer drugs. In a sort of data symbiosis, doctors can use biomarker and trial data to personalize their therapeutic decisions for each patient, while investigators can access real-world results to guide their R&D efforts. Thus, better treatment and better treatments through data-sharing.

Celgene's involvement further solidifies the Big Biotech's multi-year relationship with Soon-Shiong, which began when the company bought his Abraxis BioScience--and the now-FDA-approved cancer drug Abraxane--for $2.9 billion in 2010. Since then, Celgene has been a willing partner in Soon-Shiong's expanding NantWorks ventures, investing $75 million in the drug-developing NantBioScience earlier this year.

NantHealth has already pulled in more than $100 million in investment from the Kuwait Investment Authority and BlackBerry, but the support of a global biopharma affirms the company's potential to support drug discovery as well as administration, Soon-Shiong said.

"Our mission--our commitment--is to empower clinicians with 21st-century clinical decision support in real time, at the first point of care, through the power of supercomputing, genomic analysis and molecular analysis," Soon-Shiong said in a statement. "We are proud that Celgene has joined us in advancing this commitment; one which requires providers and researchers to work in close collaboration to innovate--and then deliver--molecular-designed cancer treatments for patients, ensuring they receive the right care at the right time to positively and proactively alter the course of their disease."

Alongside NantHealth and NantBioScience, Soon-Shiong has launched NantOmics, a molecular diagnostics venture with technology that uses genomic and proteomic analyses to profile tumors. The billionaire's overarching goal is to unite cloud computing, genomic analysis and targeted drug development to create an end-to-end oncology system that can eventually manage a patient's cancer much like the industry current handles chronic disease.

- read the announcement

Special Report: Fierce's 10 top biotech billionaires - Patrick Soon-Shiong