(NewsNation) — Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is hopeful the Saudi Arabian FDA’s approval of his cancer therapy drug, Anktiva, will lead to widespread clearance in the United States.
Anktiva is a treatment developed by Soon-Shiong’s biotech company ImmunityBio that harnesses the body’s immune system to destroy cancer tumors, potentially making chemotherapy obsolete.
According to ImmunityBio, it is the first FDA-approved immunotherapy that activates what’s called a natural killer cell to target and kill non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer cells.
Presently, Anktiva is approved by the FDA to treat a specific type of bladder cancer, despite Soon-Shiong believing it could be effective across multiple cancers. On Wednesday, the FDA in Saudi Arabia announced that it had approved it for the treatment of both bladder and lung cancer.
“There’s now really significant proof, multiple trials, 10 years of work in which we’ve shown that this actually prolongs survival, whether it’s breast cancer, lung cancer and even pancreatic cancer, now glioblastoma. So this is a universal treatment,” Soon-Shiong told “CUOMO” on Wednesday.
“Hopefully, this could convince the current FDA that something invented in America should help Americans,” he added.
Soon-Shiong, a billionaire who owns The Los Angeles Times and is a part-owner in the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, has self-funded the development of the drug.
“The money spent to develop this drug over the last decade has been out of my pocket. We’ve not received any government support, and that was never the intention. The idea was to find a way to cure cancer. This has been a life dream, and we are very close now,” he said.
Soon-Shiong expressed frustration with the FDA’s partial approval of Anktiva.
“We changed the paradigm in cancer and said, ‘We want this for our nation, and we’re not going to follow the FDA.’ We want to be first, and the FDA obviously has had multiple chances; our drug is already approved by the FDA to be the first,” he said.
“But you know, I think on behalf of the Saudi nation, together with the Middle East, this is now approved first for lung cancer and bladder cancer, and they offered that this will be approved for all other tumors as we proceed with this work now in Saudi Arabia.”