Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center from Space Needle - Seattle

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, formerly known as the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and also known as Fred Hutch or The Hutch, is a cancer research institute established in 1975 in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region o ...

, Washington.

History

The center grew out of the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation, founded in 1956 by William B. Hutchinson (1909–1997). The Foundation was dedicated to the study of

heart The heart is a muscular organ in most animals. This organ pumps blood through the blood vessels of the circulatory system. The pumped blood carries oxygen and nutrients to the body, while carrying metabolic waste such as carbon dioxide to ...

surgery Surgery ''cheirourgikē'' (composed of χείρ, "hand", and ἔργον, "work"), via la, chirurgiae, meaning "hand work". is a medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a person to investigate or treat a pat ...

, cancer, and diseases of the

endocrine system The endocrine system is a messenger system comprising feedback loops of the hormones released by internal glands of an organism directly into the circulatory system, regulating distant target organs. In vertebrates, the hypothalamus is the neur ...

. Hutchinson's younger brother

Fred Fred may refer to: People * Fred (name), including a list of people and characters with the name Mononym * Fred (cartoonist) (1931–2013), pen name of Fred Othon Aristidès, French * Fred (footballer, born 1949) (1949–2022), Frederico R ...

(1919–1964) was a major league

pitcher In baseball, the pitcher is the player who throws ("pitches") the baseball from the pitcher's mound toward the catcher to begin each play, with the goal of retiring a batter, who attempts to either make contact with the pitched ball or draw ...

and

manager Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activities ...

who died of

lung cancer Lung cancer, also known as lung carcinoma (since about 98–99% of all lung cancers are carcinomas), is a malignant lung tumor characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. Lung carcinomas derive from transformed, malign ...

at age 45. The next year, William Hutchinson established the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a division of the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation.Louis Fiset, December 30, 2004 for HistoryLink: The Free, Online Encyclopedia of Washington State Histor
Hutchinson, Dr. William B. (1909-1997)
/ref> In 1972, with the help of Senator Warren G. Magnuson, PNRF received federal funding under the National Cancer Act of 1971 to create in Seattle one of the 15 new NCI-designated Cancer Centers aimed at conducting basic research called for under 1971 Act; the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center became independent 1972 and its building opened three years later The center was named an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in 1976.NC
Fred Hutchinson/University of Washington Cancer Consortium
Page access June 27, 2015 In 1998, the center formed the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA), a separate nonprofit corporation, with UW Medicine, and Seattle Children's. This solidified the center's reach into clinical care and was essential for it retaining its NCI comprehensive center designation;BusinessWire October 24, 201
Fitch Affirms Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (WA) Rev Bonds at A+; Outlook Stable
/ref> the designation was extended to the center's consortium including the SCCA in 2003. SCCA's outpatient clinic first opened in January 2001. In 2001, ''

The Seattle Times ''The Seattle Times'' is a daily newspaper serving Seattle, Washington, United States. It was founded in 1891 and has been owned by the Blethen family since 1896. ''The Seattle Times'' has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Washington st ...

'' published a series of articles alleging that investigators at the center (including the Center's co-founder E. Donnall Thomas) were conducting unethical clinical studies on cancer patients. The paper alleged that in two cancer studies conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s, patients were not informed about all the risks of the study, nor about the study doctors' financial interest in study outcome. The paper also alleged that this financial interest may have contributed to the doctors' failure to halt the studies despite evidence that patients were dying sooner and more frequently than expected. In response, the center formed a panel of independent experts to review its existing research practices, leading to adoption of new conflict-of-interest rules. In 2010 Lawrence Corey was appointed as the fourth President, following the retirement of Lee Hartwell. He was followed by Gary Gilliland in 2015 as president, who led the institute until 2020. Under his leadership the center announced that it would expand into the former Lake Union steam plant, which previously housed ZymoGenetics. The move was completed in October 2020. In February 2020, Thomas J. Lynch Jr. took over as director. The year 2014 saw the organization adopt its longtime local nickname, "Fred Hutch", as its official name as part of a rebranding. On April 1, 2022 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) merged to form Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, a unified adult cancer research and care center that is clinically integrated with University of Washington (UW) Medicine and UW Medicine’s cancer program.

Notable faculty

The center has employed three recipients of the

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single prize, but five separate prizes that, accordi ...

: * Linda B. Buck, who received the award in 2004 for solving many details of the

olfactory system The olfactory system, or sense of smell, is the sensory system used for smelling (olfaction). Olfaction is one of the special senses, that have directly associated specific organs. Most mammals and reptiles have a main olfactory system and an ...

; and * E. Donnall Thomas, who received the award in 1990 for his pioneering work in bone-marrow transplantation and who died in 2012;Frederick R. Appelbaum.
Perspective: E. Donnall Thomas (1920–2012)
Science 338(6111):1163, November 30, 2012 and * Leland H. Hartwell, who received the honor in 2001 for his discoveries regarding the mechanisms that control

cell division Cell division is the process by which a parent cell divides into two daughter cells. Cell division usually occurs as part of a larger cell cycle in which the cell grows and replicates its chromosome(s) before dividing. In eukaryotes, there are ...

. After retiring from leading the center in 2010, Hartwell left to join

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public university, public research university in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area, Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the List ...

Commercialization

The center is active in

technology transfer Technology transfer (TT), also called transfer of technology (TOT), is the process of transferring (disseminating) technology from the person or organization that owns or holds it to another person or organization, in an attempt to transform invent ...

. In 2013, it was one of the top ten biomedical research institutions in the field (excluding universities); it made 18 new deals with companies to develop inventions made at the center, and earned $10,684,882 in income from past deals it had signed. Most notably, Juno Therapeutics, a company developing

CAR-T In biology, chimeric antigen receptors (CARs)—also known as chimeric immunoreceptors, chimeric T cell receptors or artificial T cell receptors—are receptor proteins that have been engineered to give T cells the new ability to target a specifi ...

immunotherapy for cancer and that raised $314 million in venture capital investments and had a $265 million initial public offering in 2014, was started based on inventions made at the center.Annie Zak for the Puget Sound Business Journal, February 13, 201
Fred Hutch and its amazing spinoff machine
/ref> As of 2015, about twenty companies had been started based on center inventions since 1975, including

Immunex Amgen Inc. (formerly Applied Molecular Genetics Inc.) is an American multinational biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. One of the world's largest independent biotechnology companies, Amgen was established in Th ...

and

Icos Icos Corporation (trademark ICOS) was an American biotechnology company and the largest biotechnology company in the U.S. state of Washington, before it was sold to Eli Lilly and Company in 2007. It was founded in 1989 by David Blech, Isaac ...

Campus

The institute's main campus consists of thirteen buildings on in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. In 1987, the center began exploring possible new homes to replace its 9-building campus on First Hill that it was set to outgrow. A site in the South Lake Union neighborhood, envisioned by the city as a future high-tech and

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...

hub, was chosen in September 1988 after a deal to move to Fremont fell through earlier that year. The first phase of the campus, designed by firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership, began construction in 1991 and opened on June 1, 1993 in a ceremony that included the burying of a time capsule set to open in 2093. The campus is accessible via the Mercer Street exit of

Interstate 5 Interstate 5 (I-5) is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the West Coast of the United States, running largely parallel to the Pacific coast of the contiguous U.S. from Mexico to Canada. It travels through the states of Californ ...

as well as several

public transportation Public transport (also known as public transportation, public transit, mass transit, or simply transit) is a system of transport for passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public unlike private transport, typical ...

routes, including the South Lake Union Streetcar.

References

External links