Southern Calif. Hospital Receives $35-Million
January 17, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
A biopharmaceutical executive and his wife said Tuesday that they would give St. John’s Health Center, in Santa Monica, Calif., $35-million to pay for the hospital’s expansion and for new research and treatment, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The gift from Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder of Abraxis BioScience, in Los Angeles, and his wife, Michele Chan, is the hospital’s largest individual donation.
Most of the money will go toward the hospital’s expansion from 150 to 230 beds, one of the last steps in a replacement project that began after damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The remaining $10-million will be used to establish a center where researchers can work closely with physicians to transform scientific breakthroughs into real patient treatment.
Mr. Soon-Shiong, a former surgeon and researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, said he had long been troubled by what he called the “valley of death,” or the lag time between a scientific discovery and its practical application in medicine.
