NantKwest CEO's $329.7 Million Pay Package Might Make Him the Highest-Paid U.S. Executive
April 28, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
LOS ANGELES – Patrick Soon-Shiong, dubbed the world’s richest doctor, has a new financial distinction—the highest paid chief executive officer in the United States for 2015, Bloomberg reported.
As CEO of NantKwest, Soon-Shiong earned $329.7 million last year, largely due to stop options in the company that went public in 2015. NantKwest has a market value of about $715 million, Bloomberg said. Soon-Shiong’s 194 million shares were granted to him before the company went public. NantKwest stock is up this morning, trading at $8.82 per share. However, since the stock went public last year, shares have steadily fallen from its IPO of $30.60 per share in June. NantKwest, a division of NantWorks, is developing “the natural killer cell” as a first-line defense in cancer treatment. Natural Killer (NK) cells have the “innate ability to rapidly seek and destroy abnormal cells, such as cancer or virally-infected cells, without prior exposure or activation by other support molecules,” the company said on its website. The company is moving into Phase II clinical trials to use it NK cells as a treatment for Merkel cell carcinoma.
In January, Soon-Shiong organized a coalition of companies, academics, researchers and more to launch MoonShot 2020, which is focused on bringing the “promise of combined immunotherapy as the next-generation standard of cancer care” to children diagnosed with the disease.The MoonShot 2020 has a central mission to design, initiate and finish randomized clinical trials in up to 20 tumor types in cancers of all stages in 20,000 patients by the year 2020.
MoonShot 2020 is made up of a coalition of companies, including Celgene , Amgen and Merck KgaA . The coalition formed the National Immunotherapy Coalition (NIC) to develop and test combination therapies for various forms of cancers. The programs that will run under the NIC will focus on Phase I and Phase II clinical trials to treat various tumor types for cancers including breast, lung, prostate, ovarian, brain, head and neck, multiple myeloma, sarcoma, and pancreatic cancer. The NIC has hopes of enrolling 20,000 patients by 2020.
“The era of immunotherapy has taken the oncology world by storm. For the first time in 40 years, there is a glimmer that we may be able to win this war against cancer,” Soon-Shiong said in a statement.
In addition to NantWorks, Soon-Shiong is also the former founder of Abraxis and American Pharmaceutical Partners, which he sold for a combined $9.1 billion. He also invented the drug Abraxane, for use against pancreatic cancer.
Soon-Shiong, who was dubbed the world’s richest doctor by Forbes, has a long history of backing cancer therapy development. In May, Culver City, Calif.-based NantBioscience, Inc., a division of NantWorks, Soon-Shiong’s umbrella company, reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it had received another $100 million into funding from NantWorks. Additionally in May, NantWorks acquired cancer treatment Cynviloq after buying a subsidiary of Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. for more than $1.3 billion.