September 14, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. – Patrick Soon-Shiong’s network of companies, NantWorks, LLC will not be the jobs savior that the people of Indiana were hoping for. The company announced this week it no longer intends to invest in the former Pfizer property in Vigo County.
NantWorks has been in talks with Indiana state and local officials since 2012 regarding the property and according to a state press release issued Jan. 10, 2012, the NantWorks facility was expected to be operational last year. The company initially planned to open its facility there and bring in 234 jobs, WTHITV reported this morning.
For the past four years, NantWorks has remained mum about the kind of work it may have performed at the Indiana site. However, according to reports the company said it has opted to return the property because the large manufacturing facility, which was designed for mass production, no longer fits the company’s strategy, which is a greater focus on personalized medicine.
The county is planning to take back the property instead of accepting a $1.2 million settlement. County leaders said the 210-acre property is worth more.
When NantWorks initially struck the deal for the property, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation offered NantWorks, LLC up to $2,000,000 in conditional tax credits and up to $100,000 in training grants based on the company’s job creation plans, according to the 2012 state publication.
To its credit, NantWorks has not simply walked away from the project and left local leaders high and dry. The company has been in constant communication with Vigo County officials and has attempted to find buyers for the property, WTHITV said.
Soon-Shiong, often dubbed “the world’s richest doctor,” has a number of biotech or life science-related business ventures under his umbrella company, NantWorks. 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.
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.
