Patrick Soon-Shiong is a South-African born American surgeon, medical researcher, businessman, philanthropist, and a professor at University of California, Los Angeles. He has an estimated net worth of $8.24 billion in May 2019.

Forbes also ranked him as the wealthiest American in the healthcare industry and in Los Angeles. He is most widely known for developing the metatastic breast cancer treatment drug. He is the current Chairman of the Chan Soon-Siong Family Foundation, and Chairman and CEO of the Chan Soon-Siong Institute for Advanced Health, National LambdaRail, the Healthcare Transformation Institute, and NantWorks, LLC. He is also the minority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Patrick Soon-Siong was born on July 29, 1952 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa to Chinese immigrant parents, from Taishan in Guangdong, China, who fled during the World War II. At the age of 16, he graduated from high school. He received his medical degree at 23 from the University of Witwatersrand where he was fourth out of 189. After finishing his internship at Johannesburg’s General Hospital, he earned a Master of Science degree from the University of British Columbia. He was the first resident to receive multiple research awards simultaneously from the American College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the American Association of Academic Surgery. He then moved to the United States and trained at UCLA where he became a board-certified surgeon. Dr. Soon-Shiong is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Canada) and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

Dr. Soon-Shiong has built and then sold two successful drug companies. He took American Pharmaceutical Partnership (APP) public in 2001 and founded a new company, Abraxis, in 2007. In 2008, he sold APP for $6.5 billion to Germany’s Fresenius. In 2010, he sold Abraxis to Celgene for $2.9 billion. He founded NantWorks in 2011 and is working on the new cancer therapies. In 2012, Blackstone Group Invested $125 million for a stake at the NantPharma unit. As a philanthropist, he is a member of the Giving Pledge. His donations included $5 million to the University of Chicago for the development of a technology to improve patient care and $136 million to St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California.