{"id":1423,"date":"2026-02-01T16:05:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T16:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/?p=1423"},"modified":"2026-02-01T16:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T16:05:08","slug":"patrick-soon-shiong-on-cancer-viruses-and-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/2026\/02\/01\/patrick-soon-shiong-on-cancer-viruses-and-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Patrick Soon-Shiong on Cancer, Viruses, and Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a summary of an interview of Patrick Soon-Shiong, concerning cancer, various COVID treatments, and politics.\u00a0This interview<\/a>\u00a0is 10 months old, but it\u2019s new to me (via\u00a0Dr Mercola<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Patrick Soon-Shiong was a doctor, then a biochemical researcher. He sold two of his ideas to Big Pharma for billions of dollars, and has plowed that money back into\u00a0his own research company<\/a>, aimed at curing cancer and viral disease with the same tools. He bought the LA Times and sought to diversify opinion there from a tribal loyalty to the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n

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Crash course in the immune system<\/h2>\n
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(I read about this years ago in\u00a0William Clark\u2019s accessible book<\/a>, but I seem to need refreshing each time I think about this subject.)<\/p>\n

The immune system is sophisticated and smart, with many coordinating pieces. There are four components that Soon-Shiong talks about: MHC-1 molecules, antibodies, T cells, and neutrophils.<\/p>\n

MHC-1<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0stands for Major Histocompatibility Complex. These are proteins, varying broadly from person, whose function is to live on the surface of cells and present markers, fragments of proteins that are found within, so that the immune system\u2019s\u00a0CD8 T cells<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0can inspect the cell surface and attack cells that have hung out markers that look like an invader.<\/p>\n

Viruses and cancer cells have figured this out, and they have a counter strategy against the MHC-1 communication system \u2014 they simply suppress MHC-1. That way their tell-tale flags are less likely to be found on the surface of the affected cell.<\/p>\n

The body, not to be outdone, has a counter-counter strategy.\u00a0Natural Killer<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0(NK) cells and\u00a0neutrophils<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0look for cells with surfaces deficient in MHC-1, and attack them without waiting for an enemy flag to appear.<\/p>\n

Antibodies<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0are molecular tags. One part of the antibody molecule sticks to a protein that the body has identified as foreign. Sometimes the offending protein is part of a free-floating virus or bacterium; otherwise that protein can be a tag displayed on the surface of an infected or cancerous cell. The other wing of the antibody attracts CD8\u00a0T cells<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0which destroy the protein and the cell to which it is attached.<\/p>\n

New antibodies are generated all the time, randomly by na\u00efve B cells. When a particular antibody is found to be useful, the corresponding na\u00efve B cell replicates rapidly and creates more of that antibody. This leads to\u00a0memory B cells<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The goal of every vaccine is to create antibodies to some virus or bacterium, along with memory B cells, so the body will be prepared to attack it when it arrives. Remember this \u2014 it is a key element of Soon-Shiong\u2019s critique.<\/p>\n

T cells<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0are a variety of white blood cell. CD4 T cells, aka \u201chelper T cells\u201d direct the production of antibodies by B cells. CD8 T cells, aka \u201ckiller T cells\u201d seek out infected cells and instruct them to eliminate themselves via cell suicide=apoptosis. So they don\u2019t engulf and destroy the infected cell the way NK cells or neutrophils do. They just send the signal to the cell, ordering it to commit suicide. There are\u00a0memory T cells<\/strong><\/em>, which stay resident and ready to respond anew after an infection clears. Remember this.<\/p>\n

Neutrophils<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0are the most common type of white blood cell, comprising up to 70%. They are part of the \u201cinnate\u201d immune system because they are not specifically tuned to any particular pathogen or antigen. Instead,they attack cells where MHC-1 is suppressed. This is the \u201ccounter-counter strategy\u201d described above; but in fact it turns out to be the one that\u2019s most readily available and the quickest.<\/p>\n

Neutrophils are brilliant. They not only look for deficiencies in MHC-1, but also look for a variety of protein fragments that are common to bacteria and viruses. They also attack cells that have been coated with\u00a0complement<\/a>. And when their job is done, they can turn into peace-makers, triggering the body\u2019s immune system to back off. If we were to write a computer program to describe the decisions they make, the decision tree would take hundreds of lines of code, and the information gathering would take thousands of lines. That a single cell can be capable of so much intelligence opens a little window into how much biology we have yet to understand.<\/p>\n

\u21d2 I\u2019m not an expert. Please comment if I\u2019ve got any part of this story wrong.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Soon-Shiong\u2019s message<\/h2>\n
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T cells provide better immunity than antibodies (B cells).<\/h3>\n
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Modern vaccines are optimized to create antibodies, and their effectiveness is measured using antibodies as a surrogate. But antibodies can\u2019t finish the job, and the virus stays around. We should be developing T cell therapies that completely clear the virus and provide long-term immunity. And, in fact, that\u2019s the research program of Soon-Shiong\u2019s company.<\/p>\n

Neutrophil flipping<\/h3>\n
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Neutrophils begin in an N1 state where they attack and destroy invaders. But when they detect that their job is done, they flip to an N2 state, in which they secrete signals that dial down the immune response. He claims that the mRNA vaccines have left the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a long-term resident in the body without acute symptoms. This leads to chronic inflammation, which drives the neutrophils into an N2 state, where they are suppressing our immune systems. This, in turn, leads to vulnerability to other infections, and also to cancer, since the immune system is our primary line of defense against cancer.<\/p>\n

The purpose of this flip is that after the invader is eliminated, there is a need to heal the damage. The body goes from a destructive to a constructive, pro-growth mode. But the chemistry of the pro-growth mode can accelerate the growth of cancer.<\/p>\n

Soon-Shiong doesn\u2019t describe this in enough detail for me to understand it. I think he is saying that the reason chronic inflammation increases cancer risk is that chronic inflammation flips N1 to N2, and N2 downregulates the immune response. This makes sense until you realize that the primary function of N2 is to avoid chronic inflammation.<\/p>\n

Cancer tumors secrete chemical signals that flip N1 to N2, thereby protecting themselves. Tucker asks why this should be. The tumor wasn\u2019t evolved to survive, and it doesn\u2019t have a will of its own. Why is it playing tricks that we would expect to find only in an evolved pathogen? Soon-Shiong doesn\u2019t have a good answer for this question. (Neither do I.)<\/p>\n

Vaccine development was politicized during the COVID response<\/h3>\n
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He tells the story of having a superior product ready both to treat and to prevent COVID, already available in the spring of 2020. His product was blocked from Project Warpspeed, and he was told by CDC to discontinue the work.<\/p>\n

COVID \u201cvaccines\u201d contributed to a cancer epidemic<\/h3>\n
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\u2026by turning off key elements of the immune system, as described above under \u201cflipping\u201d. [Note from JJM, not Soon-Shiong: The COVID spike protein is a bioweapon, engineered to cause multiple harms to the immune system, to fertility, to the nervous system, to the circulatory system, and to the heart itself. The vaccines amplify all these problems in a significant proportion of people who take it, as the mRNA becomes a gift that never stops giving, going everywhere in the body and continuing to churn out the toxic spike protein months or years after vaccination.]<\/p>\n

Soon-Shiong\u2019s cancer strategy<\/h3>\n
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The trouble with chemo and radiation is that they kill any fast-dividing cell. That includes tumors, but it also includes our immune systems. This is the reason that people undergoing chemotherapy see tumors shrink, only to return with a vengeance after the chemo ends. The treatment has left the body immune deficient, and vulnerable to return of the cancer or to new cancers.<\/p>\n

The approach being researched at his company (ImmunityBio<\/a>) is (1) small doses of chemo that cause the cancer cells to display their proteins on cell surfaces (2) this is followed by immune therapies that help T cells to find and destroy cancer. Soon-Shiong is a big fan of T cells, and the therapies developed by his company are based on enhancing the body\u2019s production of targeted T cells.<\/p>\n

There is also a mainstream therapy, not associated with ImmunityBio, called CAR-T, in which the patient\u2019s own T cells are removed from his blood, grown and amplified in a Petri dish, then re-injected into the patient. CAR-T shows promise but so far it only works well for a few types of cancer.<\/p>\n

Other points<\/h3>\n
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Soon-Shiong was 68 when the manufactured COVID virus was released, and he travels extensively, but he\u2019s one of the few people in the world who never had a symptomatic case of COVID. He credits his own T-cell therapy, which he was testing on himself early in the pandemic.<\/p>\n

It was a huge mistake to base vaccines on the spike protein, because the vaccines had to deliver the toxic spike protein to patients\u2019 bodies. This was made much worse by the mRNA technology, which generates spike protein in uncontrolled quantities (instead of delivering a fixed dose, as traditional vaccines do).<\/p>\n

Soon-Shiong doesn\u2019t tell us that the spike protein is toxic. The reason he gives is that the spike protein is a bad vaccine target because it is subject to rapid mutation. I think he has this backwards. The reason that the spike protein has mutated so rapidly is that it is evolving in an environment where so many people have vaccine-induced immunity that is limited to the spike protein in its original version.<\/p>\n

For all of us who have had COVID, we should get a spike antibody test, combined with inflammation tests for CRP and IL6, to see if the COVID virus is dormant in our bodies. Peter McCullough suggests a\u00a0protocol<\/a>\u00a0for clearing the virus. [technical doc<\/a>]<\/p>\n

I note that ImmuneBio\u2019s website links to an\u00a0editorial<\/a>\u00a0that denounces RFK\u2019s decision to back off CDC\u2019s previous recommendation that everyone should be getting COVID boosters. The editorial accepts uncritically the claims that COVID shots are \u201csafe and effective\u201d. You will not be surprised that I am on the other side of this issue. I think mRNA vaccines have done much more damage to health than the virus itself, that they should be pulled from the market yesterday, and the manufacturers\u00a0and FDA<\/a>\u00a0should be sued for fraud.<\/p>\n

Link to interview<\/a>\u00a0(same as provided above)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a summary of an interview of Patrick Soon-Shiong, concerning cancer, various COVID treatments, and politics.\u00a0This interview\u00a0is 10 months old, but it\u2019s new to me (via\u00a0Dr Mercola). Patrick Soon-Shiong was a doctor, then a biochemical researcher. He sold two of his ideas to Big Pharma for billions of dollars, and has plowed that money … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":1425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nPatrick Soon-Shiong on Cancer, Viruses, and Politics - Josh Mitteldorf<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/2026\/02\/01\/patrick-soon-shiong-on-cancer-viruses-and-politics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Patrick Soon-Shiong on Cancer, Viruses, and Politics\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This is a summary of an interview of Patrick Soon-Shiong, concerning cancer, various COVID treatments, and politics.\u00a0This interview\u00a0is 10 months old, but it\u2019s new to me (via\u00a0Dr Mercola). 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Patrick Soon-Shiong was a doctor, then a biochemical researcher. He sold two of his ideas to Big Pharma for billions of dollars, and has plowed that money ... 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The surprising fact that our bodies are genetically programmed to age and to die offers an enormous opportunity for medical intervention. It may be that therapies to slow the progress of aging need not repair or regenerate anything, but only need to interfere with an existing program of self-destruction. Mitteldorf has taught a weekly yoga class for thirty years. He is an advocate for vigorous self care, including exercise, meditation and caloric restriction. After earning a PhD in astrophysicist, Mitteldorf moved to evolutionary biology as a primary field in 1996. He has taught at Harvard, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, LaSalle and Temple University. He is presently affiliated with MIT as a visiting scholar. In private life, Mitteldorf is an advocate for election integrity as well as public health. He is an avid amateur musician, playing piano in chamber groups, French horn in community orchestras. His two daughters are among the first children adopted from China in the mid-1980s. Much to the surprise of evolutionary biologists, genetic experiments indicate that aging has been selected as an adaptation for its own sake. This poses a conundrum: the impact of aging on individual fitness is wholly negative, so aging must be regarded as a kind of evolutionary altruism. Unlike other forms of evolutionary altruism, aging offers benefits to the community that are weak, and not well focussed on near kin of the altruist. 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