Inside STAT: Progress in Patrick Soon-Shiong’s 2020 ‘cancer moonshot’ is hard to find

At the 2016 J.P. Morgan Health Care Conference in San Francisco, biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong unveiled an initiative to transform the fight against cancer by this year. At the same conference next week, Soon-Shiong plans to release the results of the project. But a STAT review of clinical trial listings, research presentations, and press releases doesn’t seem promising for the effort. The project appears to have enrolled only a small fraction of the 20,000 patients planned for clinical trials. Even those trials with preliminary results are early-stage safety studies and not later-stage studies that could have robustly tested vaccines for the disease. It’s also unclear whether the initiative is active at all — its website has gone dark and its social media accounts haven’t shared anything in nearly three years. Read more from STAT’s Rebecca Robbins.