Tucked away in the Pacific Northwest, Fred Hutch Cancer Center blazed an unusual path when it opened its doors 50 years ago — one of the first eight new comprehensive centers authorized by the 1971 National Cancer Act.
Seattle oncologist and surgeon William Hutchinson, MD, founded the center, which was named in honor of his younger brother, Fred Hutchinson, a Major League Baseball pitcher and manager who died in 1964 of cancer at the age of 45.
Without a massive endowment or even a hospital to call his own, Hutchinson assembled a team of doctors and scientists to accomplish three missions: investigate the fundamental biology of cancer, study the spread, control and prevention of disease, and achieve a cure for leukemia and other blood diseases through a perilous therapy called bone marrow transplantation.
The experimental procedure was difficult to endure and had a miserable track record because of thorny complications that many experts had declared unsolvable. If the skeptics were right and bone marrow transplantation proved to be a bust, that failure might have ushered retreat to less consequential work.
But the Fred Hutch team persisted despite many setbacks. When they finally succeeded, they established a cure for blood diseases that today saves the lives of thousands of patients around the world and launched a new era of medicine that seeks to harness the power of the human immune system.
That victory inspired confidence to try more hard things in the decades that followed, motivated by a simple truth: If we did it once, we can do it again.
In just 50 years, Fred Hutch grew from a regional cancer center into a world-class biomedical research and clinical care institution known for its expertise in molecular biology, tumor virology and infectious diseases, as well as the coordination of large-scale clinical and epidemiologic studies.
Today, Fred Hutch performs leading-edge research and offers clinical care that has evolved from lessons learned solving the hard problem of bone marrow transplant, driven by an enduring commitment to keep doing hard things on behalf of patients and their families.
Fred Hutch turns 50!
Take a look back at half a century of leading-edge research and compassionate care.
The same spirit of scientific ambition that motivated the founding of Fred Hutch became manifest in the public imagination more than a decade earlier in 1962 when President John F. Kennedy pledged that the United States would be the first nation to put a human being on the moon.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” Kennedy said in an address at Rice University in Houston.
Cancer, too, is a hard thing, and as the U.S. embarked on a massive effort toward reaching the moon, the idea that a bone marrow transplant could cure leukemia appeared even further out of reach after many failures.
In 1957, E. Donnall Thomas, MD, who would later become Fred Hutch’s first medical oncology director, published a landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine about six patients with end-stage leukemia he had treated with radiation, chemotherapy and an intravenous infusion of bone marrow. The grafts established in only two patients and all six had died by 100 days after the transplant.
But Thomas showed for the first time that human bone marrow could be collected, stored and given by intravenous injection without causing harm.
In 1960, Thomas found his first success in Seattle: a 6-year-old girl with aplastic anemia, which was fatal at the time with no treatments. Thomas helped perform a transplant with bone marrow donated from the girl’s identical twin, making her likely the first patient ever cured with a bone marrow transplant.
Making the procedure work with bone marrow donors who weren’t identical twins proved much harder. Prominent immunologists argued that it was doomed to fail because they believed the very biology of the human immune system would conspire against transplanted marrow at every turn.
But Thomas didn’t give up, instead turning to experiments with animals to better understand what he was up against.
The same year Kennedy promised we would reach the moon, Thomas reported in the journal Blood that five out of 41 animals lived beyond four months after receiving bone marrow transplants when they were given an anti-inflammatory drug, methotrexate, which helped the transplanted tissue get established.
In 1963, Thomas moved his lab to Seattle from Cooperstown, New York and spent the rest of the decade honing the technique, publishing several studies demonstrating its potential.
Six years later as astronaut Neil Armstrong kept Kennedy’s promise and walked on the moon, Thomas initiated a clinical trial program in Seattle for bone marrow transplants in humans.
But working in a public health hospital slated for closure, Thomas needed a permanent home for his quest.
Meanwhile, Dr. Hutchinson needed a director of clinical research for the new cancer center that would emerge from the research foundation Hutchinson established in 1956 — the first private, nonprofit, biomedical research institute in the Pacific Northwest.
Hutchinson and Thomas’s partnership became official in 1975 when Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center opened in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood.
The same year, Thomas published research showing that he had cured a minority of patients rescued in leukemia’s final stages.
Four years later, he published results showing a cure rate of more than 50% for patients who received transplants at an earlier stage when their leukemia was in remission.
In less than two decades since his landmark study, bone marrow transplant became an accepted therapy that changed the course of clinical medicine.
In 1990, Thomas was awarded the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine, the first of three Nobels won by Fred Hutch researchers.
Over the next 20 years, more than a million hematopoietic stem cell transplants would be performed and as of 2024, more than 1.5 million have been performed at more than 1,500 transplantation centers around the world.
The courage to pursue bone marrow transplantation and achieve positive results gave Fred Hutch researchers the confidence to do more hard things.
While the clinical team solved the hard problem of bone marrow transplant, Fred Hutch pursued Hutchinson’s other two missions: providing local physicians and researchers scientific expertise in fundamental biology and population-based studies of disease.
From the start, Fred Hutch recruited scientists in fields relevant to cancer, but especially sought experts in molecular biology and the role of viruses in tumor formation, which were underrepresented fields of research in the Seattle area.
Founded at the onset of Fred Hutch’s transition to a divisional structure in late 1981, the Basic Sciences Division brought together scientists seeking to understand the fundamental mechanisms of life and how the molecular processes that govern it can go awry, causing diseases such as cancer — discoveries that underly the innovative cures and therapies developed worldwide and at Fred Hutch.
Paul Neiman, MD, PhD, a member of Thomas’s original bone marrow transplant team, was the division’s first director. He and the division’s founding members established a scientific culture driven by egalitarianism, collaboration, inclusivity and creativity.
They agreed that faculty would collectively select and hire new faculty and investigators would run their own small labs, working primarily at the bench, mentoring the next generation of scientists rather than sequestered in an office administering big labs from afar.
Such an approach encourages investigators to step out of their comfort zones and pursue creative ideas they might otherwise have considered too risky for their careers.
And they collaborate early and often within Fred Hutch and with other research institutions, near and far, to augment resources and include different perspectives and areas of expertise to generate new scientific insights.
These values ensure a confident culture of scientific ambition that emphasizes the quality of publications over quantity and favors big ideas unconstrained by an institutional fear of failure.
That culture has produced many breakthroughs such as identifying the atomic structures of proteins, understanding the molecular details of gene regulation and principles of development in organisms from embryo to adult.
The Public Health Sciences Division also traces its roots to the foundation of Fred Hutch when it was called the Program in Epidemiology and Biostatistics and became the home for the first cancer prevention and control unit in the country funded by the National Cancer Institute in 1983.
Under the leadership of biostatistician Ross Prentice, PhD, the division served as a premier hub for research in biostatistics, cancer prevention and epidemiology, hosting many national data and clinical coordination centers including the Women’s Health Initiative, which has provided data for more than 2,000 scientific papers and made critical discoveries regarding the relationship between hormones and breast cancer.
Fred Hutch also recruited experts who beat a well-worn path between patient’s bedsides and laboratory workbenches to solve the problem of bone marrow transplantation.
Transplant patients, for example, were unusually susceptible to infectious disease, so Fred Hutch hired an expert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What began as a one-person research program to solve that problem — combined with the desire to expand Fred Hutch’s expertise in how viruses and pathogens cause cancer — evolved into the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division, one of the largest assemblies of infectious disease researchers at any cancer center.
Fred Hutch pioneered and continues to lead research into the role of cancer-causing viruses. Fred Hutch research on HPV (human papillomaviruses) in cervical cancer paved the way for the HPV vaccine, which has the potential to eliminate over 95% of all cervical cancers.
And Fred Hutch leads the world’s largest publicly funded collaboration focused on development of vaccines to prevent HIV/AIDs, with a clinical trials infrastructure to carry out the research, which made Fred Hutch a natural choice to coordinate development of a vaccine for the virus that causes COVID-19.
Fred Hutch also leads research to find better treatments, vaccines and cures that target HSV, which is responsible for cold sores and genital herpes, and other members of the herpesvirus family. These viruses are especially dangerous for people whose immune systems are compromised by HIV/AIDS or who are recovering from bone marrow or blood stem cell transplants.
Over the years, Fred Hutch has expanded to seven research divisions — including Human Biology, Translational Science and Therapeutics and Radiation Oncology — to leverage scientific discoveries into safe and effective therapies to prevent, treat and cure cancer and infectious diseases.
Several integrated research centers, institutes, networks and other cross-divisional programs have earned Fred Hutch an international reputation for collaboration. HICOR, the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research, for example, leads research aimed at reducing the economic and human burden of cancer and other health disparities.
Fred Hutch also leads the way on prostate cancer research as the headquarters for an international collaboration that brings together forward-thinking prostate cancer researchers at Fred Hutch, the University of Washington, Oregon Health & Science University and the University of British Columbia.
Work by Fred Hutch scientists led to the discovery that inherited mutations in the BRCA1/2 genes can drive not just breast and ovarian cancers, but also cancers of the prostate.
Another hard thing on the horizon for cancer research is making sense of the mountains of biological data researchers can extract from patient genetics to better understand exactly what’s making them sick and what specifically could make them better.
It’s become known as “precision oncology” — the practice of individualizing a person’s cancer screening, prevention and treatment strategies to help personalize their care and improve their outcomes.
Here, too, Fred Hutch is poised to lead the way through the Stuart and Molly Sloan Precision Oncology Institute.
Fred Hutch began with a single-minded focus on applying laboratory research to help a small group of patients considered incurable.
When it was founded, Fred Hutch had just a 20-patient specialized unit dedicated to terminal blood cancer treatment.
In the 1970s, other cancer centers that had started at the same time broadened their reach to cover a wide range of tumors, emphasizing the word “comprehensive” in their national designation.
Decades of donor commitment
Fred Hutch could not have grown and thrived over the years without the generosity of each and every donor. And ongoing support through the Campaign for Fred Hutch continues to fuel innovative research on the hard things. Read about the Lycettes, supporters who have been with Fred Hutch from the very start, and explore more stories of donors at the Heart of the Hutch.
As it grew over the decades, Fred Hutch focused on improving bone marrow transplantation procedures as well as other promising therapies and collaborated with other institutions that provided cancer care.
In 2022, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center merged with Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and restructured its relationship with UW Medicine, integrating clinical patient care. The newly branded Fred Hutch Cancer Center reaffirmed its commitment to “compassionate, connected patient care that puts the patient and family at front and center.” Fred Hutch now has eight clinical locations in the Puget Sound region.
Today, Fred Hutch is well on the way to turning Thomas’ key insight — that the immune system can be harnessed to eradicate cancer — into new therapies at the leading edge of a new field pioneered in Seattle: immunotherapy.
By understanding the role of disease-fighting immune cells called T cells in bone marrow transplants, Fred Hutch researchers spent decades learning how to manipulate them to target a wide range of cancers and HIV without harming healthy cells.
Some of those therapies genetically engineer a patient’s own T cells to recognize and fight cancer, one of the first examples of precision oncology. Others steer radiation to cancer cells or boost immune responses that cancer hijacks to evade the body’s natural defenses.
Fred Hutch also is developing other cancer vaccines to prevent cancer, much like the HPV vaccine, or trigger an immune response to attack the disease.
The courage to do one hard thing — bone marrow transplantation — made this new era of cellular immunotherapy possible and may ultimately make those transplants rarely needed.
Courage, confidence and commitment to do hard things defined the first half century of Fred Hutch and those virtues light the path forward.
John Higgins, a staff writer at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, was an education reporter at The Seattle Times and the Akron Beacon Journal. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, where he studied the emerging science of teaching. Reach him at jhiggin2@fredhutch.org or @jhigginswriter.bsky.social.
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Are you interested in reprinting or republishing this story? Be our guest! We want to help connect people with the information they need. We just ask that you link back to the original article, preserve the author’s byline and refrain from making edits that alter the original context. Questions? Email us at communications@fredhutch.org
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