Go Lean…Caribbean

Go Lean Commentary:

The book Go Lean…Caribbean relates the statement that “if 1-in-3 Americans are at risk for cancer, Caribbean citizens cannot be far behind”. (Page 157). Though well qualified, this statement does not need to be verified; everyone knows people that have battled or is battling cancer; (more frequently that we would care to admit). The disease often wins.

The book does not posit to be a roadmap for curing cancer, but rather a roadmap for elevating Caribbean society by optimizing the economic, security and governing engines in the region. Yet, within this roadmap is the strategy to incentivize cancer research and facilitate treatment centers and workable solutions. In fact this roadmap invites role models like medical researcher, bio-technology entrepreneur and billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, featured here in the following VIDEO and article:

VIDEO Title: Disrupting Cancer
Sub-Title: Billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is turning heads with unconventional ways of treating the deadly disease

CBS News Magazine 60 Minutes – Posted 12-07-2014 –
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/disrupting-cancer

In this week’s 60 Minutes story, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta — on assignment for 60 Minutes — profiles Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who has invested nearly a billion dollars of his own money to help find a better way to treat cancer. (VIDEO).

———————————–

Article Title: The Billionaire shaking up the world of cancer
Sub-title: Patrick Soon-Shiong: An owner of the L.A. Lakers, friend of Kobe Bryant, and a doctor who’s shaking up the world of cancer

60 Minutes producer Draggan Mihailovich tells 60 Minutes Overtime that the most challenging aspect of this profile was to give viewers a sense of what goes on in Dr. Pat’s brain.

The following is a script of the video produced for 60 Minutes Overtime by Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson and Lisa Orlando.

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: We now have patients with pancreatic cancer that are free of metatheses for five years. How many people know of that?]

That’s Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. This week on 60 Minutes Dr. Sanjay Gupta profiles the renowned doctor and entrepreneur who is shaking up the cancer world with a revolutionary approach to treatment. Dr. Soon-Shiong, also known as Dr. Pat, is not just the wealthiest man in Los Angeles; he’s a partial owner of the Lakers. And a familiar face [at court-side and] in the team’s training room.
…
Draggan Mihailovich: You’re talking about a city that thrives on celebrity and status.

Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson: He’s neither.

Draggan Mihailovich: He’s neither. You know, most people have no idea. They think it’s somebody involved in the entertainment industry. Or, you know, a movie producer or, you know, even an actor. And it’s Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.…
Sanjay Gupta: I think Dr. Soon-Shiong is one of these guys who is probably used to having been the smartest guy in the room probably from a very young age.

One of the biggest challenges for Gupta and Mihailovich was how to give viewers a sense of what goes on in the mind of a medical genius.

They began by asking him about his ground-breaking cancer drug Abraxane.

Draggan Mihailovich: There was a white board there. He takes a marker and he starts, you know, as you saw at the beginning of the piece, and off he went. And this goes on for 45 minutes. I mean, it was as if your kid took, like, a bowl of spaghetti and threw it up against a white wall.

Sanjay Gupta: It was this idea that cancer patients lose weight. But why do they lose weight? Even if they eat the same number of calories or even double the calories that they used to eat, they could still be losing weight. Why? What Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong was sort of thinking about was it’s the protein in the blood that is just sucked up by these cancers. So if the cancers love proteins so much, here’s an idea. Let’s stick the chemotherapy in the protein, and the protein’s now a Trojan horse around the chemo. So the cancer is happy. It’s being fed. It’s getting all this protein. Boom. Chemo goes off on the tumor. And all of a sudden, you got a very, very effective, potentially, therapy.

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: We have it approved in breast cancer, we have it approved in lung cancer and were talking about patients in pancreatic cancer, and melanoma.]

Sanjay Gupta: That’s Dr. Patrick’s mind.

Dr. Soon-Shiong believes that the conventional approach to classifying cancer according to its location in the body is short-sighted. He says it’s the mutation of the gene, what made it go haywire, that matters.

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: We need to reclassify cancers now to its molecular fingerprints.]

Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson: He’s not just thinking out of the box. I mean, he’s creating a revolution.

Sanjay Gupta: He’s absolutely creating a revolution, and it involves so many different facets that are not just medicine. Quick example, when you’re talking about sequencing genomes of many, many patients — around the United States and around the world, that is a lot of data, you’re talking about 6 billion pieces of information for each patient. Right now, we move things through the Information Superhighway at about megabytes per second. He’s talking about wanting to do that in petabytes per second.

Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson: Never heard of that.

Sanjay Gupta: You got megabytes. 1,000 megabytes is a gigabyte. 1,000 gigabytes is a terabyte. 1,000 terabytes is a petabyte. So you’re talking, you know, exponentially, more data per second. And he’s basically figured out ways and funded ways to make that happen. That’s part of what a revolution looks like.

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: Here we have the world’s fastest video camera, what we’ve done is to take the power of optics or the sun and created a rainbow from laser light.]

Draggan Mihailovich: He’s involved in the technology. He’s involved in immunotherapy.

[Sanjay Gupta: So you’re literally watching cancer cells die here?]

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: Correct.]

Draggan Mihailovich: He’s involved in circulating tumor cells. You know, he’s involved in metastatic cancers. He’s still involved in some respect with his original drug, Abraxane, and how that’s used in combination therapies. And the brain is always working with Patrick.

[Sanjay Gupta: Is there anything like this right now? I mean, is anyone doing this sort of.]

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: No, it’s in our lab. This is what you call the clinical translation world where 21st century exists today.]

Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson: He comes across as incredibly confident and, if one has cancer, is he the only game in town?

Sanjay Gupta: I don’t think Doctor Pat is the only game in town, by any means. I think he’s someone who’s looking at trying to disrupt the whole system. I think there are a lot of great oncologists out there, and frankly, there are a lot of oncologists who not only believe what he’s doing is the right thing to do, but they’re doing it themselves. They’re doing it; it’s just its smaller scales. Patrick’s, sort of, belief is, “Look, I already think that this is what’s going to work.”

Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson: He’s screaming it from the rooftops.

Sanjay Gupta: Screaming it from the rooftops, spending his own money.

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: Well, I haven’t really counted, but it’s close to a billion dollars.]

[Sanjay Gupta: A billion dollars?]

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: Billion dollars.]

[Sanjay Gupta: Where’s the government in all of this?]

[Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: Trust me, we tried. You know, since 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, I was in Washington, I was at the White House, I was at Congress, I was everywhere. We have not received one penny of funding.]

Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson: Is he an easily accessible physician?

Sanjay Gupta: There were times when I’d be riding along with him, his phone would ring and, it would be somebody who had been, sort of, referred to him by somebody, you know, one of those situations. And he’d be on the phone with them for 15-20 minutes. “Here’s what I think you need to do.”

Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson: For the hundreds of thousands of people on chemotherapy, Dr. Soon-Shiong is not saying, “Stop what you’re doing.” But he’s pretty much on the edge of that.

Draggan Mihailovich: What he’s saying is, “Ask questions.” You know, is this the right thing to do. Because more and more what scientists and oncologists will tell you is that perhaps in some cancers, and I’m gonna qualify this. In some cancers, a heavy blast of chemotherapy may not necessarily be, you know, the long-term answer.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-billionaire-shaking-up-the-world-of-cancer/

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the implementation and introduction of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU‘s prime directives are identified with the following 3 statements:

• Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
• Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
• Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book asserts that one person can make a difference and maybe even change the world. The innovations and passions of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong may very well fit this advocacy. He is a role model for Caribbean innovators and scientists. We invite him; and others of his ilk, to impact the world from a Caribbean domicile. How?

One feature of the Go Lean roadmap is the adoption of Self-Governing Entities (SGE). These dedicated, bordered grounds are ideal for medical research and treatment campuses for resources like Dr. Soon-Shiong. We hereby extend the invitation to him … and all like-minded individuals looking for cooperative and supportive governing structures to facilitate their impact on the world.

The Go Lean book strategizes a roadmap for economic empowerment in the region, clearly relating that healthcare, and pharmaceuticals/cancer drugs research are important in the quest to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work, heal and play. At the outset of the Go Lean book, in the Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 11 & 14), these points are pronounced:

 ix.  Whereas the realities of healthcare and an aging population cannot be ignored and cannot be afforded without some advanced mitigation, the Federation must arrange for health plans to consolidate premiums of both healthy and sickly people across the wider base of the entire Caribbean population. The mitigation should extend further to disease management, wellness, obesity and smoking cessation programs.

xxvii.  Whereas the region has endured a spectator status during the Industrial Revolution, we cannot stand on the sidelines of this new economy, the Information Revolution. Rather, the Federation must embrace all the tenets of Internet Communications Technology (ICT) to serve as an equalizing element in competition with the rest of the world. The Federation must bridge the digital divide and promote the community ethos that research/development is valuable and must be promoted and incentivized for adoption.

xxviii.  Whereas intellectual property can easily traverse national borders, the rights and privileges of intellectual property must be respected at home and abroad. The Federation must install protections to ensure that no abuse of these rights go with impunity, and to ensure that foreign authorities enforce the rights of the intellectual property registered in our region.

Previous blog/commentaries addressed issues of cancer and other medical research and practices, sampled here:

Cancer is a crisis, and a “crisis would be a terrible thing to waste”.

This premise is loud-and-clear from the foregoing VIDEO. Dr. Soon-Shiong is already a billionaire from his development (and returns) of other cancer drugs (like Abraxane). This demonstrates that there is money to be made in this industry-space. Most importantly, however, there are lives to be saved.

The foregoing news article and VIDEO provides an inside glimpse into the cancer research discipline. Obviously, the innovators and developers of drugs have the right to glean the economic returns of their research. The Go Lean roadmap posits that more innovations will emerge in the region as a direct result of the CU prioritization on science, technology, engineering and medical (STEM) activities on Caribbean R&D campuses and educational institutions. This is based on the assumption that intellectual properties (IP) registered in the Caribbean region will be duly respected around the world.

This IP protection mandate, on behalf of all 30 member-states, is a heavy-lifting task for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. (Cuban cancer drugs do enjoy this recognition at this time, despite the country’s irrelevance in American commerce).

This is an issue of economic, security and governance.

The CU has the prime directive of optimizing the economic, security and governing engines of the Caribbean region. The foregoing article and VIDEO depicts that research is very important to new medical innovations and break-throughs. This is the manifestation and benefits of Research & Development (R&D). The roadmap describes this focus as a community ethos and promotes R&D as valuable for the region. The following list details additional ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize the region’s health deliveries and R&D investments:

The Go Lean roadmap does not purport to be an authority on medical or cancer research best practices. The economic-security-governance empowerment plan should not direct the course of direction for cancer research and/or treatment. But the war on cancer has been stagnant for far too long; yet more can be done. As depicted in the foregoing article, the solutions are not coming from the governments, so the needed innovation must be incentivized from private enterprises. The SGE structure invites innovations like that of Dr. Soon-Shiong and many others with his passion…and genius.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerments in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. This is a Big Idea for the region, that of Self-Government Entities (Page 127), in which R&D and Genius can take hold, and thrive. We can make the Caribbean a better place to live, work, heal and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!