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Sanjay Gupta MD

Forecasting the Flu; The Billionaire Shaking Up the World of Cancer; Ebola Fighters are "TIME's" Person of the Year

Aired December 14, 2014 - 07:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN HOST: On the program today: the richest physician in the world. He is owner of the L.A. Lakers, friend of Kobe Bryant, and he is now investing nearly a billion dollars of his own money to finding a better way to treat cancer. We'll introduce you.

But, first, this flu season could be more severe, you could see more hospitalizations and more deaths because of a mutation that has occurred in the most common strain of the virus that's circulating this year.

So, here with me to talk a little bit more about this is my producer, Ben Tinker.

You have been finding some of the most common questions.

BEN TINKER, CNN MEDICAL PRODUCER: Yes, a lot of people want to know when it's coming. And we actually got a really cool look at this new tool that predicts the flu kind of like meteorologists would predict weather.

GUPTA: Yes, it's really interesting, because typically, they use mathematical models and use last year's data. But now, they use the model, they use real-time data, people searching for flu on Google, things like that, entering information, and then they assimilate all that information and you get a sort of heat map.

And take a look at this for a second -- you get an idea of where flu is going to be particularly bad: hotter spots, flu is going to be bad.

And they can even go deeper than that. If you look at a particular city, you can find when the flu is going to be worse. In New York City, if you live there, the prediction is the week of January 10th -- that's when flu is going to be the worst. There is a Web site, if you're going to look at your own city, they're up on the screen. But the thing is I guess the value you might keep your kids home from school, cancel play dates, hospitals could have more surge capacity, because they anticipate more cases of flu?

TINKER: A lot of people ask every single year, do I really need to get the flu shot? The people who don't get it swear they never get sick. The people who do get it say they only don't get sick because they got the flu shot. GUPTA: Right.

TINKER: What do you say?

GUPTA: Did you get the flu shot?

TINKER: I did get the flu shot.

GUPTA: OK, good, because everybody in our medical unit has to get the flu shot.

TINKER: Yes.

GUPTA: I get the flu shot, as well.

Here's what people are talking about this year, is that there is a strain called H3N2. Now, this is in part a guess. When they make the vaccine, they're going to guess which strain is going to be the most dominant strain that flu season and that's what you vaccinate against. Sometimes, you can vaccinate against a couple of strains.

This time, the strain mutated a little bit. It doesn't mean it's a completely different strain. It added a protein here and lost a protein in another place.

So, here's the point: the flu shot will still offer a lot of benefit, not as much if it was the exact match, but it's still going to offer a lot of benefit. And to your question, it's not too late. You can still get it, because as you saw, January 10th is going to be the week in New York City where flu is going to be worst.

TINKER: So, you still have a little bit of time.

GUPTA: Still a little bit of time.

TINKER: So, I don't know about you, but when I was young, my mom always said, you know, don't got outside, don't get too cold, you are going to get sick. The cold doesn't make you sick but we've found there are actually reasons why this time of year is the time of year when most people get sick from the flu.

GUPTA: I think every mom probably said that at some point or another.

TINKER: Your mom telling you that probably, too.

GUPTA: But you know what's interesting is that it's not so much this idea that you are going to go outside and catch a cold or catch the flu, but there are some reasons why it's worst. We spend more times indoors. So, if one person has the flu, all of a sudden, they can spread it to many people and that make it seem like there's more flu going around. Also, because of the season you get less sun light, you get less vitamin D, less melatonin, you get changes in your immune function overall.

And then, finally, there are some correlations with the weather but maybe not in the way that you think. Colder weather, less humid. Viruses can live longer if it's less humid. So, the virus just stays around longer as well.

So, those are three reasons why it's more common. Although, you know, still, it's amazing nobody knows exactly for sure.

TINKER: Right. So, mom may have been right but just not for the reason she said.

GUPTA: You know, moms were trying to pass something. They were trying to get us to wear a hat. They said, you will catch the flu. They knew you were not going to catch the flu as long as you wear your hat.

TINKER: Then, you wear the hat.

GUPTA: You wear the hat. You're still here.

TINKER: And I'm still here.

GUPTA: And I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

TINKER: Absolutely.

GUPTA: Hopefully, that answered some questions for you.

Up next, disrupting cancer. This incredible Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, he is turning some heads with unconventional ways of treating this deadly disease.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GUPTA: Cancer has outwitted scientists and doctors for decades. More than 1,500 people still die of the disease every day in this country. But scientists will tell you they have learned more about cancer in the last five years than ever before. And no one is more optimistic about what that will mean for patients

than Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. He has been called a genius, a showman, an innovator and a hypester. He is also the richest man in Los Angeles, a doctor and entrepreneur who's worth an estimated $11 billion. Soon-Shiong was a respected surgeon before making his name in the cancer world by developing a multibillion-dollar drug that few initially thought would even work.

He now wants to disrupt the conventional way we treat cancer. Soon- Shiong is overflowing with ideas on how to do it.

(BGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. PATRICK SOON-SHIONG, FOUNDER & CEO, NANTHELTH: That was what I call feed the tumor.

GUPTA (voice-over): Give Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong a white board and a few markers, and like a mad scientist, he'll diagram how he thinks cancer can be beaten. He wants to attack on multiple fronts and is confident there is a pathway to the cure.

For 45 minutes, he outlined his vision from beginning to end. (on camera): This is a crazy looking board.

SOON-SHIONG: This is what goes in my head. It's like bursting, it just asks to get the stuff out.

GUPTA: And are we looking inside your head?

SOON-SHIONG: Yes, I think so a little bit.

GUPTA: How long before we get here?

SOON-SHIONG: I'm incredibly encouraged to say that we are on the path and the technology to actually do of these things is not just hypothetical.

GUPTA: Technology is the main weapon Soon-Shiong is deploying against cancer. In October at his company's headquarters in Los Angeles, final tests were being run on high-speed tumor genome sequencing machines that Soon-Shiong is convinced will unmask molecular secrets to cancer.

SOON-SHIONG: For the first time with this technology, we can watch it, catch it, and outsmart it and play chess at this multidimensional level.

GUPTA: To understand the significance of what Soon-Shiong is touting, it's important to know what cancer is.

SOON-SHIONG: A cancer is not what people think cells growing. Actually, a cancer is actually the inability of the cells to die.

GUPTA: The key is figuring out the genetic mutation or glitch that prevents cells from dying a natural death. Soon-Shiong's hope is provide patients with the precise genetic mutations that fuel their cancer regardless of where tumors are found in the body.

SOON-SHIONG: Mutation that happens in lung cancer could be the exact same mutation that happens in breast cancer. So, you need to treat that patient based on mutation and not on the physical anatomical location.

GUPTA (on camera): That's a big idea. I mean, you know, the idea that the breast cancer specialists are looking for breast cancer mutations and they may be missing the ball.

SOON-SHIONG: Absolutely.

GUPTA (voice-over): A lung cancer drug could work on breast cancer, for instance, if the mutation is the same.

The concept of doing away with labeling the disease by where it's found is not unique to Soon-Shiong. But it is a tectonic shift in the fight against cancer, the notion of classifying a cancer by its mutation.

SOON-SHIONG: Imagine reclassifying cancer and having people conceive and understand that cancer is a slew of red diseases. So, I'm very excited because we are going to create this revolution.

GUPTA (on camera): And what's it going to mean? I mean --

SOON-SHIONG: What it's going to mean that you have a better shot of having a better outcome and having a quality of life and actually turning cancer hopefully into chronic disease.

GUPTA: That's very optimistic. Realistic, as well?

SOON-SHIONG: I think so, very much so.

GUPTA: Soon-Shiong has appointed himself to lead this revolution.

Cancer genome sequencing is not new, but what's different about Soon- Shiong's project is the scale. He has spent nearly $1 billion of his own money to build a massive infrastructure run by super computers to find every single genetic mutation that could drive cancer.

This is Soon-Shiong's plan -- a patient anywhere in the world has his tumor biopsied. The tumor cells complete genetic map is then created all the way down to the proteins that are produced. What only recently took months can now be done in a day. Ultimately personalized information for each cancer patient would show up in the palm of his hand.

SOON-SHIONG: This is a baby.

GUPTA (on camera): That's it, huh?

SOON-SHIONG: It will be the world's first browser of the cancer genome. Think about that. You will be able to fly through to get to the single letter that's mutated.

GUPTA (voice-over): He has teamed with BlackBerry to produce a device that will identify for patients and doctors what they need to make more informed decisions.

(on camera): At the end of the day, someone has a tumor, they can find out the complete analysis of that tumor and what the perfect drug is to treat it?

SOON-SHIONG: Correct. And that's not -- that's what's exciting, because at the end of the day, this is what we think we can bring to the world now.

GUPTA (voice-over): But some in the cancer world fear Soon-Shiong is getting ahead of himself, that he's declaring victory before any of this has been proven to work consistently.

DR. DEREK RAGHAVAN, LEVINE CANCER INSTITUTE: It's show me the money. Show me the data. Show me that it's true.

GUPTA: It's Dr. Derek Raghavan, a renowned oncologist and researcher is president of the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina. (on camera): Dr. Soon-Shiong says, well, if we can figure out which

mutations are driving a cancer, we're going to be better able to find the drugs that can treat that cancer. Is that a fair theory? Has that been proven?

RAGHAVAN: I think that is a fair theory.

But to say I can throw a tumor into a gismo and that gismo will tell me the answer in a few minutes and everything will flow from that, I don't think we are there now. I don't think we will be there next year. I think there's just too much hard complex science that has to be done before this is state of the art. But it's a very cool idea for the future.

GUPTA (voice-over): The vast majority of mutations are actually not a threat. So, to figure out which mutations are dangerous, Soon-Shiong is going back in time.

SOON-SHIONG: This national treasure.

GUPTA: Wow.

(voice-over): In the basement of the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, California, decades of cancer tissues were stored by scientists in deep freeze vats. Now, Soon-Shiong wants to use technology that didn't exist back then to map the genomes of these thousands of tissues in order to look for critical patterns.

(on camera): So, even after a patient died, their samples were stored here. They can go back and say, oh, they had this mutation and now we can explain that this mutation actually leads to death and other mutations may not.

SOON-SHIONG: That's exactly right. And ask the question why did this patient live and why did this patient die? Why did this treatment work, why did that not work?

GUPTA (voice-over): To make any of this work, Soon-Shiong believes you need to up end the way cancer drugs are developed.

SOON-SHIONG: I know it sounds an odious goal, but you need to develop 20 to 30 drugs a year to actually get ahead of this game.

GUPTA (on camera): Right now, it takes a few years to create a single drug. And you are talking about 30 drugs in one year. Is that really feasible?

SOON-SHIONG: I think that's where we have a challenge in the pharmaceutical industry. We actually need to change the way we actually develop drugs now.

GUPTA: Soon-Shiong is impatient with the pace of drug approvals. In the early '90s, he invented a drug called Abraxane, that treats pancreatic, lung and breast cancer patients. But more than a decade passed before the FDA approved it. SOON-SHIONG: The problem is for cancer, we don't have that time. You

know, if you have pancreatic cancer, you have two months. You have mitoses destroyed your body. The war against cancer is a war against time.

GUPTA: Soon-Shiong is also frustrated with what he calls the trial and error cycle of cancer care.

SOON-SHIONG: The truth of the matter we treat cancer today, we guess. We take what we call average results, put it on you and see if it works, if it doesn't work, oh, we try another drug. If it doesn't work, we stop the drug.

When you look back ten years from now, it's almost barbaric.

GUPTA: The 62-year-old native of South Africa can afford to be outspoken because of his immense wealth. He doesn't need to rely on the government or big pharma for funding.

Soon-Shiong is certain what he terms the dark age of cancer treatment is nearly over. And the enlightened age is about to begin.

(on camera): What would the average person note about the enlightened age versus dark age?

SOON-SHIONG: The treatment doesn't need to be painful. Mitosis doesn't need to be a death sentence. Cancer could be a chronic disease and treated towards the cure.

GUPTA (voice-over): While the oncology world may cringe when he boasts as he is prone to do, patients see him differently.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The established community doesn't like false hope, but if you have a terminal disease like I do you want some hope.

GUPTA: David Roy was diagnosed two years ago with stage four metastatic pancreatic cancer. He was given four and a half months to live and told to settle his affairs.

He called Dr. Soon-Shiong whom he had met on a plane years before. Soon-Shiong recommended a UCLA oncologist who devised an unusual therapy that combined Abraxane with other cancer drugs. Then, Soon- Shiong had Roy's tumor genome sequenced. Based on those results, Roy is now taking part in a clinical trial involving another front in cancer treatment.

SOON-SHIONG: That's a T-cell, and that's the cancer cell.

GUPTA: It's called immunotherapy. Soon-Shiong is not the only one working on it but he was anxious to show us why oncologists believe it's a promising field. A time lapsed demonstration of how T-cells which our immune systems naturally produce can attack cancer cells.

SOON-SHIONG: This is a cell gobbling up the cancer cell. This cell will go grow in size and the cell will decrease in cell. So, here's the T-cell gobbling it up. Here is the cancer cell. GUPTA (on camera): That's amazing.

So, you are literally watching cancer cells die here.

SOON-SHIONG: Correct.

GUPTA: You find these T-cells and you're able to isolate them is the idea then that you could -- you know they do the job, you can come out and grow them, proliferate them and put them back into the body?

SOON-SHIONG: Exactly.

GUPTA (voice-over): Even though it has been two years since David Roy's original diagnosis, he is realistic about his chances of survival. But he is convinced Soon-Shiong and other scientists are on track to dramatically decrease cancer death rates in the not too distant future.

DAVID ROY, DIAGNOSED WITHI STAGE IV PANCREATIC CANCER: I'm not sure it will happen fast enough for me, but I have every confidence that my children and grandchildren won't be concerned about the things that I'm concerned about. We are on the odds here of going from the oil lamp to electricity, and it is going to happen.

GUPTA: Soon-Shiong's most provocative idea, though, centers on how cancers may become metastatic.

(on camera): He believes chemotherapy works best when administered in frequent low doses, and that in some cancers, the traditional method of blasting a tumor with heavy doses of chemotheraphy may actually be counterproductive, because it could induce cancer cells to escape the hospital environment, and to the blood stream and find a new home.

(on camera): It's on the move.

SOON-SHIONG: It's on the move. And it's looking for another place to land.

So, circulating tumor cells in the blood is the next frontier. So, here, those are circulating T-cells.

GUPTA: That's incredible.

(voice-over): If cancer spreads, the likelihood of survival decreases dramatically. So, before individual rogue cancer cells pan out and form new tumors, Soon-Shiong wants to detect them with what are known as liquid biopsies, a person's blood samples put through this biochip that separates normal blood cells from heavier circulating tumor cells. This is a view inside the biochip as the tumor cells are being funneled to the top.

SOON-SHIONG: And if we can now monitor the cancer cell in the blood, we then have the path to getting this and winning this war. We never had this path before.

GUPTA: After pulling out the circulating tumor cells, scientists can take them back to the genome sequencing, to look for new mutations that made them resistant to the initial treatment and hopefully find a new drug to treat it. It's yet another angle Soon-Shiong is taking to disrupt cancer.

(on camera): You've got genomics. You have circulating tumor cell, liquid biopsies, death by T-cell. Why are you the one taking all of this on? Why -- I mean, these are lots of different types of things.

SOON-SHIONG: Right. You know, somebody once said to me, you know, Patrick, you are all over the place. I said you have to be all over the place because I'm trying to fight this war from all over the place, because you can't -- there is one single magic bullet.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: Well, still ahead -- no, it's not Dr. Pat or Taylor Swift or Vladimir Putin or even Roger Goodell. "TIME Magazine" names Ebola fighters its Person of the Year.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA (voice-over): Watching goalie Greg Ozubko block shots during practice for the minor league Gwinnette Gladiators, you'd probably never guess he's 50 years old.

Just 16 years ago, he couldn't even move without severe pain.

GREG OZUBKO, GWINNETTE GLADIATORS PRACTICE GOALIE: Any movement, anything physical was very greatly restricted.

GUPTA: Lacing up skates was out of the question. Greg started playing hockey as a kid. He played through high school, and a little in college, but he knew he wasn't going to make the NHL, so he moved on in his life.

Goaltending wasn't even a thought when he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 1998. He started taking medication and was feeling so great that being an NHL spectator motivated him to get back on the ice in 2002.

OZUBKO: One night, it just flipped a switch and it just went, you know, I want to go do this again. The very next day I dug my stuff out of the attic.

GUPTA: He caught the attention of some coaches who invited him to play with an elite group and then came an invitation to a training camp for the Gwinnette Gladiators in the East Coast Hockey League. That led to a spot as a backup goalie.

OZUBKO: In November of 2011, I dressed for my first professional game which was a profound experience.

GUPTA: He no longer dresses for games, but he still practices with the team when he's needed. Greg is also a liaison to help players half his age appreciate how lucky they are to be playing professionally, a perspective he has drawn on from his own experience.

OZUBKO: I never would have believed that I would have had an opportunity like this.

GUPTA: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA (voice-over): They risked and persisted, sacrificed and saved. This week, "TIME Magazine" named its 2014 Person of the Year the Ebola fighters -- they are the doctors, the nurses, the ambulance drivers, the burial teams who battle in the war against this deadly virus. They spent the past year fighting to save the lives of family, friends, neighbors and complete strangers.

The World Health Organization tallies more than 6,000 deaths among roughly 18,000 sick. What started off as a single case of Ebola last December in Guinea has grown into an epidemic of unprecedented proportions.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: You know, I have seen these Ebola fighters work in West Africa. I've seen their work here in the United States. And I will tell you, as a doc, when I take care of patients, fundamentally, I'm not risking my life to take care of them. It always struck me when I was spending time with these Ebola fighters -- these doctors, nurses, health care personnel -- in order to help somebody else, they are literally taking their own lives into their own hands. And they do this sort of work every single day. They put on the garb, they walk into the tents, they hope and pray that they have done everything right so that they don't get infected, they don't get sick and possibly die.

But they're not sure. And we have seen this over and over again. And also, when these Ebola outbreaks start, it's always the health care worker teams that get sick first. There's been no infrastructure for health care in many of the countries that we have been talking about.

So, you know, on a pragmatic sense unless these health care workers are able to fix the problem there, it's not solved elsewhere around the world. And again, that's what they're doing right now.

That's going to wrap things up for SGMD today.

"CNN NEWSROOM" continues after a quick break, with Poppy Harlow.