Balint and Lita spend up to seven days a week streaming — looking at insects, cells and more under a microscope with a camera feed; discussing the latest science news; and even taking viewers on field trips to collect fossils or visit nature areas — with hours of preparation going into each episode. They also invite other scientists to come on the stream to share their research and recount the journeys that brought them to science, including several from Fred Hutch. For example:
- Elizabeth Bonner, a graduate student in the Stanley Lee Lab, talked about the path she took from bartender to PhD candidate and her work studying the role of blood stem cells in age-related blood cancers.
- Pravrutha Raman, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Harmit Malik Lab, shared how she is studying fruit flies to better understand histones, specialized proteins that help organize and package DNA in cells.
- Jacob Frick, a graduate student in the Nina Salama Lab, declared his love for bacteria, a passion that drives his research on Helicobacter pylori, a corkscrew-shaped microorganism that is the cause of up to 80% of gastric cancers.
Two or three times a year, Lita and Balint transform their livestream into a fundraiser for Fred Hutch, inviting their community to join them in supporting science to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection and treatment.
“A lot of folks in the community are touched by cancer,” said Balint. “People want to help solve something that their loved one is going through.”
Balint and Lita are among 80 unique Twitch and YouTube content creators who have raised almost $150,000 since 2019 through Stream for Fred Hutch. Their efforts — combined with those of thousands of others who rally support from friends and family by creating Fundraise for Fred Hutch pages or participating in events like Obliteride and Base 2 Space — have a profound collective impact on cancer and infectious disease research.
This community support is a booster rocket for scientists and clinicians who are working to unravel the complexities of fundamental biology, cancer and infectious disease. While donors can choose to support the faculty member or area of research that means the most to them, unrestricted dollars — like those Balint and Lita’s followers contribute — play a special role.
Unrestricted support is nimble, giving researchers the flexibility to quickly follow where the science leads. Right now, it’s helping a team at Fred Hutch genetically engineer a model system for testing drugs against Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare skin cancer caused by a virus. Another team is using flexible funding to isolate receptor molecules on immune cells donated by patients with gliomas, a type of brain cancer. The library they are assembling will help them develop a drug to target these tumors.
Collectively, unrestricted funding sustains important research programs and tools over time, including a data-rich repository of blood and tumor samples from patients with breast cancer, a resource many research teams rely on for studies to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
Balint and Lita believe it is their responsibility, as scientists, to make science accessible and understandable to people everywhere, and the energy they put into their livestreams is continuously renewed by the virtual community they’ve created. By uniting their supporters behind research at Fred Hutch — research that is decoding and redefining cancer — they are also making a powerful difference for future generations.
