Sue Biggins, PhD, Director of the Basic Sciences Division, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute InvestigatorTranslating Discoveries Into Breakthroughs
For 50 years, Fred Hutch has been creating conditions that enable our passionate, dedicated teams to make groundbreaking advances across prevention, detection, treatment and survivorship. As we look beyond what’s possible today, we're building on decades of progress to shape the future of cancer and infectious disease research and care — at the lab bench and in partnership with our patients and communities. Here are three examples.
Transplants, Immunotherapies and Beyond
Bone marrow transplantation showed the immune system's ability to overcome cancer and sparked an immunotherapy revolution. That was just the beginning. We're building on every discovery to design increasingly tailored approaches to patient care.
Leading From the Center
For almost as long as Fred Hutch has existed, national and international institutions have looked to us to design, manage, and report on studies and clinical trials that shape cancer care and public health. Here's why we’re trusted as a coordinating center for some of the world’s most influential research.
The Mysteries of MYC
Robert "Bob" Eisenman, PhD, has spent nearly half a century piecing together the puzzle of one cancer-causing gene and the finely balanced network of molecules it interacts with. His team's landmark findings could change the way we treat a range of cancers.
Transplants, Immunotherapies and Beyond
Bone marrow transplantation showed that it's possible to leverage the immune system to fight cancer, leading to groundbreaking immunotherapies. We're continuously building on these discoveries, using the unique molecular makeup of patients and their cancers to design personalized treatments that harness the body's innate disease-fighting abilities.
A Radical Cure for Leukemia
In the 1960s and 1970s, when leukemia was a nearly universal death sentence, E. Donnall Thomas, MD, was laser-focused on the radical idea that patients could be cured by replacing their bone marrow with healthy marrow from a donor. Visionary scientists and clinicians — experts in immunology, infection, statistics, nutrition and more — flocked to the newly founded Fred Hutch to work with him. Together, the team overcame daunting obstacles on the way to a revolutionary success.
Dr. Thomas received the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for bone marrow transplantation. To date, more than 1.5 million people around the world have received transplants. The approach is now used to treat more than 100 diseases, offering the chance of a cure to 100,000 patients every year.
Discoveries Rooted in Bone Marrow Transplantation
Transplantation seeded infectious disease research at Fred Hutch that continues to thrive, and it has yielded a steady stream of discoveries that continue to advance the standard of care for patients. Here are just a few examples.
We helped refine the understanding and use of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing — the immune system's way of differentiating a body's own cells from invaders — to define and expand the scientific framework for matching transplant recipients with donors. Learn about the renowned researcher who led Fred Hutch’s HLA matching program.
To spare patients from the pain and risks of repeated needle sticks, Fred Hutch nephrologist Robert Hickman, MD, invented a catheter in the early 1970s that is now used worldwide. It allows caregivers to administer fluids, medications and nutrition through the same intravenous site. Read about Dr. Hickman and his “gift to the world.”
We founded the country's first program to study and treat common infections that were uniquely dangerous for transplant recipients. It's grown into a world-renowned infectious disease research enterprise that continues to protect immunocompromised patients, find connections between cancer and infection, and break ground in stemming global threats like HIV and COVID. Explore how our science has redefined the understanding of cytomegalovirus, or CMV, disease — a serious post-transplant infection.
Harnessing the Immune System
Bone marrow transplantation provided the first definitive and reproducible evidence of the potential for the human immune system to eliminate cancer, sparking a new era of immune-system exploration. Our scientists built on this discovery, focusing first on decoding how T cells — the body's natural disease fighters — recognize, target and eliminate cancers. Teams across Fred Hutch have worked together to:
Understand the mechanisms and pathways that activate and suppress T-cell activity.
Create computational tools to systematically decode what immune cells "see" to better prevent, detect and treat disease.
Establish a first-of-its-kind clinic that puts patients at the center of a bench-to-bedside-to-bench research cycle focused on understanding and improving cellular immunotherapies.
Hear Stan Riddell, MD — a trailblazing immunotherapy researcher and holder of the Burke O'Reilly Family Endowed Chair in Immunotherapy — describe the astonishing results of an early CAR T-cell trial.
Personalized Prevention, Early Detection and Treatment for More Cancers
Immunotherapies have radically changed how a number of cancers are treated. But they aren’t yet effective for all patients with blood malignancies or for those with solid-tumor cancers — like breast, lung and prostate cancer — which make up nearly 90% of all cancers diagnosed in the U.S. each year.
Today, powerful new technologies — from spatial genetic sequencing to artificial intelligence — are giving scientists insight not only into the immune system and immune-driven therapies but also into countless other molecular variables that drive health and disease.
From Transplantation and Immunotherapy to Precision Oncology
Our goal is to understand precisely what is driving each person's cancer so we can provide the right treatment at precisely the right time. That’s the promise of precision oncology, and it has the potential to do for solid tumors what bone marrow transplantation and immunotherapy have done for blood cancers. To realize that potential, our teams are ...
Exploring elements of the immune system, like antibodies, to find new, more precise ways to prevent and treat cancers.
Transforming radiation therapy into a precision treatment by altering the dose, timing and type of radiation delivered to trigger an immune response that destroys cancer everywhere in the body.
Inventing new tools for researchers everywhere, including a technique to extract previously inaccessible genetic information from decades-old tumor samples — unlocking enormous amounts of new data about common and rare cancers.
Designing a platform that can screen approved drugs, quickly and efficiently, to match the unique characteristics of patients and their tumors with existing therapies.
“This is an amazing time to bring together all of the data and information that we have over millions of patients and couple that with our basic research telling us how to target cancers. That is going to be so powerful. It’s almost like discovering a new universe.”
— Sara Hurvitz, MD, Senior Vice President, Director of the Clinical Research Division, and Smith Family Endowed Chair in Women’s Health, Fred Hutch; Professor and Head, Division of Hematology and Oncology, UW Medicine
“This is an amazing time to bring together all of the data and information that we have over millions of patients and couple that with our basic research telling us how to target cancers. That is going to be so powerful. It’s almost like discovering a new universe.”
— Sara Hurvitz, MD, Senior Vice President, Director of the Clinical Research Division, and Smith Family Endowed Chair in Women’s Health, Fred Hutch; Professor and Head, Division of Hematology and Oncology, UW Medicine
“This is an amazing time to bring together all of the data and information that we have over millions of patients and couple that with our basic research telling us how to target cancers. That is going to be so powerful. It’s almost like discovering a new universe.”
— Sara Hurvitz, MD, Senior Vice President, Director of the Clinical Research Division, and Smith Family Endowed Chair in Women’s Health, Fred Hutch; Professor and Head, Division of Hematology and Oncology, UW Medicine
Leading From the Center
Almost since opening its doors, Fred Hutch has designed, managed and reported the results of national and international research efforts to improve health. That ongoing role as a coordinating center for some of the largest clinical trials in the U.S. and beyond showcases some of our greatest strengths.
- We know numbers. For decades, Fred Hutch has been home to world-renowned biostatisticians who understand what makes studies impactful: designing them to collect meaningful data that produce statistically significant results.
- Our expertise abounds. With an unmatched breadth and depth of expertise in everything from basic science to translational research, our teams are equipped to interpret study data with nuance and rigor.
- Collaboration is key. We excel as a coordinating center thanks to our commitment to team science — a foundational Fred Hutch philosophy that fuels world-changing collaborations between our biostatisticians, bench scientists and clinical experts.
The following examples represent just a portion of the outsized contributions Fred Hutch continues to make to understanding disease biology, advancing leading-edge treatments and improving the delivery of care.
Expanding Representation in Science
The Women's Health Initiative
Since 1991, the WHI has gathered and analyzed invaluable health data from more than 161,000 women in an observational study and trials that continue to improve our approach to prevention. As the initiative has evolved, participants from a variety of ethnic and geographic backgrounds have contributed to groundbreaking findings that, among other things, have helped reduce breast cancer prevalence by nearly 13,000 cases per year and saved more than $37 billion in health care expenses. Most important, they've shed much-needed light on a population that had been historically underrepresented in research.
Multi-ethnic Observational Study in Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities
Like the WHI, the recently launched MOSAAIC aims to expand our understanding of a previously understudied population. Unlike its predecessor, though, it isn't focused on specific questions about prevention. Instead, MOSAAIC is gathering data from 10,000 participants to establish baseline knowledge about the cardiovascular health of 40 ethnic subgroups. And those findings could be the beginning of a much deeper — and broader — effort to improve health equity.
Clinical Trials Leadership
The SWOG Cancer Research Network
Every new drug that improves treatment for patients gets tested — and retested — through rigorous clinical trials, many of which are run simultaneously at hospitals and cancer centers across the country. SWOG includes 1,300 institutions that participate in these types of multicenter trials, and for more than four decades we've collected, analyzed and interpreted every piece of data they've produced. At any given moment, Fred Hutch is overseeing more than 100 trials, at various points in their development. SWOG's work has led to the U.S. FDA's approval of 14 new cancer drugs and changed the standards of care more than 100 times.
The Cancer Screening Research Network
We're just as committed to improving cancer detection as we are to developing new treatments. Which is why we became the coordinating center for the CSRN in early 2024. To evaluate the dozens of new and complex technologies that screen for cancer — including multi-cancer detection assays and liquid biopsies — we'll design the studies, train the nine organizations that carry them out and analyze the data they gather. And as with much of our work, a focus will be on improving health equity, in this case by validating screening methods that could be easier to access for marginalized communities.
Public-Private Partnerships
The HIV Vaccine Trials Network
More than 1 million people around the world are diagnosed with HIV every year. For more than two decades, HVTN has led a global effort to develop a vaccine that could help end the epidemic. Drawing on our deep experience in immunology and virology, we direct this collaboration between the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the pharmaceutical industry, which enrolls thousands of participants in trials every year. In addition to deciphering the many complex factors that will need to come together to produce a safe, effective HIV vaccine, the lessons we've learned from our partnerships with communities around the world laid the groundwork for our leadership of the COVID-19 vaccine trial effort.
The Cancer AI Alliance
Today, artificial intelligence is creating new possibilities for cancer research. Tomorrow, it could transform discovery altogether. But first, AI models need mountains of data, which are available — and siloed — within cancer centers across the country. CAIA is a first-of-its-kind partnership between cancer centers and companies, including Amazon, Deloitte, Microsoft and Nvidia, to safely and securely unlock the enormous potential of that data with AI to find patterns and possibilities that could lead to truly revolutionary breakthroughs.
"We have a long history of expertise in biostatistics here in Seattle, and particularly at Fred Hutch. And that depth of understanding in what data we need, and how best to analyze it, allows us to design studies in a way that will produce truly impactful results."
"We have a long history of expertise in biostatistics here in Seattle, and particularly at Fred Hutch. And that depth of understanding in what data we need, and how best to analyze it, allows us to design studies in a way that will produce truly impactful results."
— Garnet Anderson, PhD, Senior Vice President and Director, Public Health Sciences Division, and Fred Hutch 40th Anniversary Endowed Chair
— Garnet Anderson, PhD, Senior Vice President, Director of the Public Health Sciences Division, and Fred Hutch 40th Anniversary Endowed Chair
The Mysteries of MYC
Robert "Bob" Eisenman, PhD, a cancer biologist at Fred Hutch, has spent five decades piecing together the puzzle of an enigmatic gene, called Myc, that is implicated in at least 20% of all cancers. For decades, researchers knew Myc played a role in driving the growth of cancers. Bob had to know how.
Across 185 publications, which have been cited more than 30,000 times by researchers worldwide, the Eisenman Lab has painstakingly detailed the complex Myc network — a network that, when off-kilter, can spark or fuel disease. The picture they've revealed has opened doors to precision treatments for multiple cancers, all targeting a gene once thought undruggable.
Among their landscape-changing discoveries:
- Showing that Myc does not function in isolation but is part of a complex, self-regulating network. Like mapping the threads of an intricate spider web, Bob and his team have detailed the finely balanced nature of this network to reveal how different cancers are driven by alterations to its many parts.
- Discovering the first seven of the 10 components of the Myc network, including Myc's primary "dance" partner, Max. The discovery of Max sparked decades of inquiry by researchers and companies worldwide as well as clinical trials of potential new drugs.
- Uncovering the role of Max in driving small-cell lung cancer and in neuroendocrine tumors.
- Demonstrating that targeting the extended Myc network's role in metabolism — one of many roles it plays — can reverse the growth of Myc-driven neuroblastoma and pancreatic tumors.
Fifty years young and the Eisenman Lab is just getting started asking the fundamental questions that will transform precision oncology.
Fifty years young and the Eisenman Lab is just getting started asking the fundamental questions that will transform precision oncology.
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