More funding for billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s NantBioscience has been reported to the SEC – to the tune of $100 million this time. NantBioscience is the division of Soon-Shiong’s umbrella company, NantWorks, that centers on precision medicine.
Los Angeles-based NantWorks has more than $1 billion in funding behind it since its launch last year, but it’s interesting to watch how the funding trickles to the different divisions.
Nearly $200 million has been allocated now to NantBioscience, according to the SEC. NantHealth’s been allocated more than $300 million; NantOmics has gotten $10 million; NantMobile’s at $80 million.
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So where is all this funding headed?
NantHealth was cited last week by Soon-Shiong while speaking at the American Telemedicine Association. He said that his company’s built out the “Google of genome mapping.” MedCity News reports:
Soon-Shiong explained that as NantHealth builds out its Clinical Operating System — launched in February 2014 with $1 billion behind it — clinicians will be able to browse through an entire genome on a mobile device, through the cloud, and search base genomes to find specific abnormalities that might point to personalized treatments of cancer or other serious diseases. The goal, he said, is to reach “nirvana of coordinated delivery of care.”
Soon-Shiong said that the future of healthcare is in predictive modeling, with technology that can measure physiology and pathology not just at the genetic level, but down to specific proteins.
This trajectory seems to have a logical tie-in with NantBioscience, which, though rather hush-hush about its exact plan of action, did announce this: In September, it teamed up with a University of Colorado researcher to develop protein-targeted anti-cancer drugs and diagnostics. MedCity News reports on the exclusive licensing deal around the Ral protein:
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University of Colorado’s work, formulated by researcher Dan Theodorescu, just got published in Nature: “Discovery and characterization of small molecules that target the GTPase Ral.” The idea here is that blocking these Ral proteins that drive tumor growth and metastasis could be valuable as both research tools and cancer therapeutics.
“This collaboration with Dr. Dan Theodorescu and the University of Colorado Comprehensive Cancer Center furthers our goal to catalyze personalized precision cancer care in our war against cancer,” Soon-Shiong said.
What’s next? At this point, seems like NantWorks is the Willy Wonka factory of precision medicine and futuristic healthcare.
