New Yorkers. This is the 77 WABC min. All right, we are working without Annette here, but now we are finally connected. As I said, I had a very good friend, a very prominent public person, a brilliant, brilliant guy. He was actually being treated for double hit B cell lymphoma, a type of cancer, and he believed that a drug that was developed by our guest Dr. Patrick Soon-shiong, we're just going to call him Dr. Patrick, saved his life. Now Dr. Patrick served as a transplant surgeon and faculty member at UCLA where he performed the first whole pancreas transplant at UCLA. But he is both a physician, a surgeon, also a great entrepreneur. He founded and led two major pharmaceutical companies, American Pharmaceutical Partners and Abraxis Bioscience, which were sold for a combined $9.1 billion. He is owner of two important media properties, the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, Herb Klein's old paper, which is because of his support for independent journalism. He's also a minority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers. I've looked some pictures of him online. Looks like a swashbuckling guy. And he developed the drug Abraxane that my friend is absolutely convinced saved his life. So, Dr. Patrick, welcome to the Roger Stone Show. I'm going to let you lay this out for us.
Well, thank you so much, Roger. I appreciate the opportunity. Look, I think if you don't mind, I would like to sort of give the story of what exciting opportunities await our nation, in fact, the world. And I want to talk about really what my mission has been for my life. And I'm now at the brinks of this exciting time that we've now I think found what we call the holy grail, a molecule called IL-15 or interleukin 15, which we've now developed, is approved, and it's ready to deploy. So I honestly believe that we have the opportunity of America to lead in this effort and the president should help us lead in this effort. So if I may, if I could just take you back a little back in time in history in 2007, way back almost 20 years ago now, the scientific world convened to rank which molecules could potentially cure cancer. And for that event, the National Cancer Institute, the NIH, together with the world's top scientific leadership gathered, and what they wanted to do is find out which molecule in the world that is known could cure cancer. Well, they ranked number one a molecule called IL-15. Number one, it is what they call a T-cell growth factor. And this is the molecule that we've now developed. They ranked number two the checkpoint inhibitor, and this we all know as Keytruda or Opdivo, which you see on TV, which basically takes or breaks up T-cells. So what is the irony? Well, the irony is that the world including our country and big pharma like Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer and the FDA spent the last decade developing the number two agent, that's Keytruda, and the number one agent was left on the shelf because nobody could develop it or find a way to develop it. Well, here we are in 2024. Not only had we developed it, it was approved finally by the FDA and that was the milestone. We were approved for bladder cancer, which able to save the patient's bladder, otherwise the bladder would have to be removed. So this molecule, this missing link, was found, developed, never in the history of medicine available to stimulate your own immune system, your natural killer cell that God had given us that has evolved over 450 million years in our body, and by a simple subcutaneous injection of this IL-15, this holy grail, your natural killer cells and your T-cells grow. So what is the problem? Where are we now? Well, there are two issues and there are two crises facing us. One crisis is what I call turbo cancers. We are seeing a rising cancer and I am fearful that we are going to have a pandemic of cancer, especially young children. In crisis number two, we also seeing that as we age, the cause of early death, and I'll cite to you a paper that's just published in JAMA, that in the United States general population, if your NK cells and T-cells are low, meaning lymphopenia, the word lymphopenia, you have a significant increase, 30 to 80% increase of dying earlier. So your longevity and aging is affected. So these are two independent crises that we can now for the first time in history address and solve. So let me talk about crisis number one. So crisis number one is cancer. So what is the problem? Well, we've been spending years and years and Merck's revenue right now is $20 billion a year on these molecules which was ranked number two called checkpoint inhibitors, Keytruda, and they fail. The problem when they fail, they fail because your T-cells are no longer available and these drugs are supposed to take the brakes off T-cells. But if there are no T-cells, there are no brakes to take off. And the only way to fix that is to grow more T-cells in your body and that is the number one molecule that was ranked in 2007 called Anktiva, which grows these T-cells and natural killer cells in your body. These are the cells that God gave you. IL-15 is what God gave us in our body to actually stimulate and is the missing link to grow these. So that's the need. So what is the problem now then for cancer patients? Well, the FDA approved Keytruda with now for over 40 approvals of all solid tumors with what you call single arm trials. Meaning you do a test in breast cancer, you do another test in lung cancer, etc. And the FDA approved them. And with regard to Anktiva, we have such single arm trials approved. But the FDA has only approved it for bladder cancer. We now have over 13,000 Americans begging for the use of this drug. I'm not allowed to give it to them unless they have this subset of bladder cancer. There is an asynchronous mechanism of approval if you're a large pharma of the last 20 years at Merck, true, the number two ranked drug, it was approved for single arm trials. For Anktiva, the number one ranked drug, they are suggesting I do randomized trials in every tumor type which will take five lifetimes and I'm going to do them as confirmatory trials, but in the meantime, Americans are dying.
