Fred Hutch marks “50 years of doing hard things”

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.

In 1970, in the journal Blood, a second-year medical student named Frederick Appelbaum read a paper describing a 46-year-old man with blastic crisis of chronic myelogenous leukemia who was given 950 rads whole-body irradiation followed immediately by 17.6 x 109 marrow cells. 

To rescue this patient from this lethal dose, the study’s senior author—E. Donnall Thomas—injected marrow cells from the patient’s sister into the patient, and the cells successfully grafted. 

The concept, blood marrow transplantation, was considered new, strange, and imperfect. Appelbaum, then a student at Tufts, felt the unmistakable recognition of his own path in the world. 

“Why does somebody love classical music or someone love poetry? There are things that just appeal to us,” said Appelbaum, executive vice president, professor in the Clinical Research Division, and Metcalfe Family/Frederick Appelbaum Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. “[Bone marrow transplantation] hadn’t been worked out in humans yet. But the idea that you could get rid of someone’s entire hematopoietic system and transplant a normal one in place of it just seemed extraordinary.

“From then on, don’t ask me why, it was like having my brain tattooed. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind,” he said. 

Delving deep into Thomas’s role in discovering bone marrow transplantation and its role in curing hematologic cancers, Appelbaum, who became Thomas’s mentee and collaborator, wrote “Living Medicine: Don Thomas, Marrow Transplantation, and the Cell Therapy Revolution.”