Patrick Soon-Shiong, the richest doctor in the world, and Blackberry Chief Executive John Chen made some news at Thursday’s Forbes Healthcare Summit, revealing a new app that will allow doctors to review a cancer patient’s genes on a Blackberry phone. Soon-Shiong also announced that we should expect an initial public offering of one of his companies, NantHealth, next year, and that he plans to use the proceeds in part to create a charitable trust like the U.K.’s Wellcome Trust, which was created using wealth generated by pharmaceutical giant Borroughs-Wellcome, which is now part of GlaxoSmithKline.
In an interview with Forbes Media Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes, Chen gave his pitch for the Passport phone, which is wider than other phones (the size, Chen emphasized, of a physical passport) and can also handle large amounts of data. Then Soon-Shiong, who is aiming ‘Nant’ companies at changing the way cancer is treated, held up the phone as it loaded an analysis of a sample genome from the cloud.
NantHealth’s business model looks to focus on selling hospital systems on a system that will connect all of their devices and records together to create real-time dashboards for administrators and doctors. The genomics work, which will also include analyses of gene expression and proteins in order to pick better treatments for cancer patients, are also part of the system.
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