Patrick Soon-Shiong, Chairman of Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation, Executive Chairman at ImmunityBio, and Executive Chairman of the Los Angeles Times, shared a post on X:
“Connecting the scientific dots. Please note that we are in the planning clinical trial stages to address lymphopenia and it IS NOT APPROVED as a therapy. IL-15 is the molecule we are discussing here. So connecting the dots:
1. 2007 workshop by NCI ranking IL15 as the number one ranked molecule since it is a T CELL GROWTH FACTOR.
2. When you age, or when you have infection or cancer your T cells decrease, sometimes to dangerous levels… that’s called lymphopenia.
3. The diagnosis of lymphopenia is EASILY made with a routine blood test performed millions of times everywhere in the world with what is called a CBC differential and the measurement is the ‘Absolute Lymphocyte count’ or ALC
4. Zidar et al., 2019 (JAMA) including authors from Cleveland Clinic, Duke, Case Western reported that 20% suffer from Lymphopenia. Worse, these authors showed ~2x higher probably of dying earlier when you have severe lymphopenia… dying from what they report as ‘all causes’.
Title: Association of Lymphopenia With Risk of Mortality Among Adults in the US General Population
Authors: David Zidar, Sadeer Al-Kindi, Yongmei Liu, Nikolas Krieger, Adam Perzynski, Michael Osnard, Christopher Nmai, Donald Anthony, Michael Lederman, Michael Freeman, Robert Bonomo, Daniel Simon, Jarrod Dalton
Read the Full Article on JAMA Network
5. Today I receive a paper in press 28 May 2026 entitled ‘First-week absolute lymphocyte count dynamics and 28-day mortality in older adults with sepsis’.
The author’s stated,
‘Sepsis is now understood not only as hyper inflammation but also as a state of prolonged immunosuppression.”
Title: First-week absolute lymphocyte count dynamics and 28-day mortality in older adults with sepsis
Authors: Esra Yakışık Aktekin, Behiye Deniz Kosovalı, Şerife Gökbulut Bektaş, Deniz Erdem, Firdevs Tuğba Bozkurt Biçer
Read the Full Article on BMC Infectious Diseases
Amazing and timely paper.
I do not know these authors but I look forward to meeting them. It seems that doctors in Turkey get it and clinical trials are needed to confirm that treating lymphopenia could reduce mortality.
6. I must emphasize that to date, there is NO drug approved to treat lymphopenia and our goal is to initiate clinical trials to confirm the hypothesis that by treating lymphopenia we have the potential to improve mortality in patients with sepsis. The results of increased mortality in the findings reported in today’s paper are striking.
Imagine the cost savings if we could reduce the ICU and hospital length of stay. Table 6 shows 10 days more in the ICU with lymphopenia and 12 days more in the hospital with significant increase of death in Figure 3.”
Other articles featuring Patrick Soon-Shiong on OncoDaily.
