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If Cancer Becomes Biden’s Cause, a Bold but Polarizing Doctor Is On Call -
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If Cancer Becomes Biden’s Cause, a Bold but Polarizing Doctor Is On Call

White House Letter

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — One day last winter, desperate as his son fought for his life
against a killer brain cancer, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
<http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/joe-biden> and his family reached out
to one of America’s most famous, and controversial, doctors for help.

The doctor, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire medical entrepreneur and
investor who made a fortune developing an important cancer drug and now has
broader ambitions for fighting cancer, flew to Washington from California
to meet with the vice president’s family. That would open a series of
meetings over time with the vice president as well as with Beau Biden, the
ailing son.

In the end, Beau Biden died of his cancer
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/us/politics/joseph-r-biden-iii-vice-presidents-son-beau-dies-at-46.html>
in May. But the vice president and the cancer doctor have developed a
relationship that is powering the next stage of Mr. Biden’s public life.
Having concluded that he did not have enough time
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/us/joe-biden-concludes-theres-no-time-for-a-2016-run.html>
to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton
<http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton> for the
Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Biden is instead embarking on a
campaign perhaps more daunting: finally defeating cancer.

“I believe that we need a moonshot in this country to cure cancer,” Mr.
Biden said in his speech in the White House Rose Garden last month
announcing that he would not run for president. “It’s personal. But I know
we can do this.”

In describing this “moonshot,” Mr. Biden was adopting language used by Dr.
Soon-Shiong to describe his aspiration for cancer research. The two met for
an hour in the White House just a few weeks ago, and Dr. Soon-Shiong gave
the vice president a two-page outline of what he had in mind.

“We need to find a completely different way to change cancer care in this
country,” Dr. Soon-Shiong said in an interview. “Vice President Biden could
play an amazing role in making this happen.”

His stature and personal experience give Mr. Biden a unique opportunity to
bring together Republicans and Democrats, the doctor added. “He’s very
passionate about it.”

For a politician whose career has been built on passion, this is when Mr.
Biden is figuring out what comes next. He turns 73 this month and faces
involuntary retirement in January 2017 after 44 years as a senator and vice
president. After focusing on trying to save Beau and then on whether to run
for president, Mr. Biden is only now beginning to concentrate on his
remaining 15 months in office and beyond.

Friends hardly expect him to while away days in retirement. “One thing you
can say about Joe Biden
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/joseph_r_jr_biden/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
is he won’t go quietly into the night,” said former Senator Ted Kaufman, a
Democrat from Delaware and longtime aide who remains one of his closest
advisers.

While friends ruled out another elective office or post like secretary of
state, they said Mr. Biden could serve as a university president or special
envoy for specific international missions. The family has established the
Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children, and the vice
president attended its first charity golf tournament in Wilmington, Del.,
last week.

The transition could be hard for a man accustomed to the action.

“He’s had this incredible life at the very center of the great issues
surrounding our nation and its future — war and peace, you name it, he’s
been at the center of that stuff,” former Vice President Walter F. Mondale
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/walter_f_mondale/index.html>
said. “When he walks out of that office at the end of their term, he’s
going to wonder what in the hell is he going to do.”

Mr. Mondale, who spent time with Mr. Biden in Washington last month, said
there was life after the vice presidency. “He’s still got a lot of zip in
him,” he said. “He’s healthy, and he’s got a huge name around the world.”

For now, the cancer idea has absorbed Mr. Biden, but he is only starting to
sort through how to approach it.

“It really captures so many of the policies and ideals that make the vice
president special,” said Robert Hoopes, a former aide to Mr. Biden. “It’s
personal. He brings an intensity to it that really resonates with people.
He knows how to get stuff done.”

Federal cancer funding has been relatively flat for more than a decade
except for a onetime $1.3 billion burst from President Obama
<http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/barack-obama>’s stimulus program early
in his administration. For the 2016 fiscal year, the National Cancer
Institute asked for $5.8 billion, and Mr. Obama pared that to $5.1 billion
in his proposed budget, roughly the same as in 2010.

The two-page paper Dr. Soon-Shiong gave Mr. Biden, titled in part “The
Moonshot Program to Develop a Cancer Vaccine,” advocates an expanded use of
genome sequencing to understand individual cancers better and tailor
treatments depending on their genetic characteristics. It forecasts the
creation of patient-specific cancer vaccines that harness a person’s own
“natural killer cells” to treat and prevent the recurrence of cancer.

The paper, obtained from an associate of Mr. Biden’s, proposes performing
full genomic sequencing of 100,000 cancer patients in the next 400 days to
create a vast database for supercomputer analysis, although no price tag is
mentioned. “With 16 months to go, it is a perfect moment for the
administration to deliver on this last mile, cementing this health care
transformation into the fabric of health care,” it says.

Dr. Soon-Shiong, 63, the son of Chinese immigrants growing up in
apartheid-era South Africa, studied medicine and eventually moved to the
United States, where he worked as a surgeon. He invented the cancer drug
Abraxane in the early 1990s and has become a major investor in medical
businesses, philanthropist and part-owner of the Los Angeles Lakers. With
his NantWorks health empire, he has accumulated a fortune estimated by
Forbes at $12.5 billion <http://www.forbes.com/profile/patrick-soon-shiong/>,
and he was featured last year on “60 Minutes”
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/billionaire-doctor-fights-cancer-in-unconventional-way/>
as the man trying to disrupt cancer.

But he has been in the middle of conflicts. A dispute with his own brother
resulted in a lawsuit. A New York Times investigation
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/when-a-buyer-for-hospitals-has-a-stake-in-drugs-it-buys.html>
in 2002 questioned the financial relationship between a drug company he
headed and a hospital drug purchaser. Some cancer researchers view him as a
“blowhard” with a “deep streak of P. T. Barnum showmanship,” as Forbes put
it
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/09/10/medicines-manhattan-project-can-the-worlds-richest-doctor-fix-health-care/>.
His companies are for profit, and researchers say he sometimes oversells
his ideas.

“I’ve heard him make claims that are clearly wild exaggerations,” said
Steven Salzberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins
University.

Mr. Biden should seek multiple voices, the professor added. “I would urge
him to be careful about putting all his eggs in one basket,” he said. “If
he says Patrick Soon-Shiong is it, then of course I’d be cautious about
that.”

Mr. Biden’s aides emphasized that he is reaching out to an array of
experts. Among them is Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung, a co-director of the brain
tumor center at University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston,
who treated Beau Biden and has remained in close touch, exchanging emails
with the vice president after his announcement last month.

Dr. Yung said in an interview that Mr. Biden should not rely exclusively on
Dr. Soon-Shiong. “He certainly has a controversial name and is polarizing,”
he said. “I think he was consulted during Beau’s illness, and he was
pushing the vice president pretty hard to sell his program.” But Dr. Yung
said Mr. Biden “has to be careful” to be inclusive and not look as if
“you’ve already been sold by one or two parties.”

Still, it is easy to see why Dr. Soon-Shiong may appeal to Mr. Biden. If
both may employ hyperbole at times, Dr. Soon-Shiong’s expansive talk about
revolutionary change can be infectious. He is no incrementalist, and for a
politician in the final stage of elective life, there is no time like the
present to make a mark.

“I’ve never been more hopeful in my life about our chance of changing the
course of this disease,” Dr. Soon-Shiong said. And Mr. Biden can make that
happen. “Here’s a man who enveloped himself during his son’s illness and
got to understand the fine intricacies of this disease and is a person who
could cross the aisle and work with Republicans and Democrats.”

If it works, he said, “this whole world could change.”


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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