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Fred Hutch Cancer Center Senior Vice President and Director of the Clinical Research Division Sara Hurvitz, MD, recently received the inaugural Smith Family Endowed Chair in Women’s Health.
The new endowed chair, established by Kathy Surace-Smith, a former life sciences industry executive, and Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, will provide an enduring source of flexible funding to help fuel efforts to improve survivorship and quality of life for women with cancer.
“It’s an absolute honor that Kathy and Brad have chosen to support me with an endowed chair and invest in this research,” Hurvitz said. “It’s also a tremendous acknowledgement of the importance of this work on behalf of women. So it’s an honor and a great responsibility.”
A commitment to clinical research
Hurvitz joined Fred Hutch and UW Medicine in August 2023 from UCLA, where she directed the Breast Oncology Program, co-directed the Santa Monica-UCLA Outpatient Oncology Practice and served as the medical director of the Clinical Research Unit for UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. And that’s where she first witnessed how critical flexible funding can be for helping an idea or observation blossom into full-fledged research.
“Sometimes we need a small pilot project to provide proof of principle before we can go forward and address something on a larger scale,” Hurvitz said.
In fact, one such small trial that she launched at UCLA is still active and gathering valuable data about which patients with breast cancer are more likely to benefit from chemotherapy.
Fred Hutch President and Director Thomas J. Lynch Jr., MD, who holds the Raisbeck Endowed Chair, said the honor recognizes Hurvitz’s decades-long commitment to advancing rigorous clinical research.
“Kathy and Brad have identified what we saw when we recruited Dr. Hurvitz in 2023: she is a dedicated, observant, curious clinician who is keenly focused on improving outcomes for women with cancer,” Lynch said. “We’re ecstatic and profoundly grateful that they’ve chosen to support her research in this way and continue investing in Fred Hutch so generously.”
Improving treatment, one trial at a time
Hurvitz came to Fred Hutch with a rich history of developing and leading clinical trials of all phases. By the time she left her former institution, she’d helped build the breast cancer program’s clinical trial portfolio from three open trials to more than two dozen.
In each case, she was driven by a desire to answer questions that can lead to new treatment options for women with cancer. And she’s particularly interested in research that reveals which women will benefit from each treatment.
“I love neoadjuvant clinical projects with rich biomarker endpoints,” she said.
In neoadjuvant trials, patients receive experimental treatments prior to surgery, giving researchers the opportunity to see how the tumor responds. Just as valuable, though, is the opportunity to identify commonalities between those patients whose tumors shrank. Whether genetic or molecular, these biomarkers of treatment response could one day help clinicians more efficiently and accurately decide who should receive what treatment — and when.
“That information can also be applied to larger clinical trials to assess which patients should be enrolled,” Hurvitz said. “It’s all part of our larger precision oncology effort.”
Now, with the flexible funding offered through the Smith Family Endowed Chair in Women’s Health, Hurvitz looks forward to employing neoadjuvant trials — among other methods — to study treatments for even more cancers that affect women, particularly when it comes to quality of life during and after treatment.
“Fred Hutch is legendary for its work in survivorship and women’s health,” Hurvitz said. “For more than three decades, this center has produced tremendously impactful discoveries in its leadership of the Women’s Health Initiative. And there are so many experts here who are poised to do important work in survivorship issues for women who face diseases like cancer. It’s my goal to both build the programs that already exist here and use the funds provided by the endowment to seed smaller projects that may lead to even bigger initiatives that support survivorship.”
Generosity with multiple goals
This is the second chair that Surace-Smith and Smith have endowed in three years. The first, the Kathryn Surace-Smith Endowed Chair in Health Equity Research, went to Rachel Issaka, MD, whose work focuses on reducing colorectal cancer deaths and disparities, particularly among members of racial and ethnic minority groups and low-income populations. At Fred Hutch, donors can choose to endow a chair for a faculty member with a gift of $2 million or more.
The timing of the new endowment, so soon after the first, was influenced by a number of factors. For one, witnessing how the first endowed chair allowed Issaka to expand her research had a profound impact on the family’s giving. Fred Hutch currently has 42 endowed chairs, which allow donors to partner with scientists and clinicians and invest in high-risk, high-reward research.
“The funding has allowed Dr. Issaka to feel less constrained to study what she wants,” said Surace-Smith, who has served on Fred Hutch’s Board of Directors since 2014, most recently as its chair from 2021 to 2023. In just the last year, Issaka has published research on the effectiveness of a new liquid biopsy for colorectal cancer and the potential for increasing screening rates by mailing fecal immunochemical tests to members of at-risk communities.
Surace-Smith and Smith are also signaling the importance of giving to the Campaign for Fred Hutch. Surace-Smith chairs the campaign, and the endowment is just one part of a $5 million leadership gift that the couple hope will inspire donors to support the organization’s ambitious $3 billion effort to radically increase the pace and scale of innovation. The gift will also support significant initiatives in cancer disparities research.
Just as important, Surace-Smith recognized the need for increased emphasis on research related to women’s health. A December 2024 report by the National Academies found that between 2013 and 2023, less than 9% of grant funding from the National Institutes of Health went to women’s health research. Perhaps even more troubling, that funding decreased as a share of overall NIH grants during the same period.
“So when we were thinking about where our next gift could go, I was very interested in supporting women’s health,” Surace-Smith said. “And we’re just thrilled that Dr. Hurvitz could be the recipient.”
Hurvitz has seen firsthand the decreased emphasis on women’s health research, so she’s doubly inspired by Surace-Smith’s acknowledgement of the problem and eagerness to address it.
“Early in my career, I felt a great sense of hope as I saw the emergence of phenomenal therapies that were changing the prognosis associated with different cancers that disproportionately affect women,” she said. “Now it’s critical that we prioritize that work again to make sure we don’t lose that foothold that we established.”
