A billionaire biopharmaceutical executive and his wife said Tuesday that they were giving St. John’s Health Center $35 million to complete its reconstruction and help put it on the frontier of biologically based research and treatment, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The gift from Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder and chief executive of Los Angeles-based Abraxis BioScience Inc., and his wife, Michele Chan, is the Santa Monica hospital’s largest individual donation ever and one of the largest received by a community hospital in California.
Much of it will fund 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.
But $10 million will be used to map out the Chan Soon-Shiong Center for Translational Sciences, an example of growing interest in so-called translational medicine. Universities, drug companies and hospitals have in recent years sought to move more quickly from science to solutions. Such efforts meld or bridge research, development and treatment , three enterprises that had traditionally been largely separate.
