The Daily Tell

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has received a donation of $10 million to advance the promising field of immunotherapy research to treat and cure cancer, even in late stages.

The donors, the Bezos family, said they are optimistic that their investment in immunotherapy – a direct outgrowth of the Hutchinson Center’s Nobel Prize-winning work on bone marrow transplantation – will help change the face of cancer treatment.

The family’s gift is expected to fortify Hutchinson Center’s Program in Immunotherapy, a $28.5 million endeavor that, Center researchers believe, may open the door to the final stage in the war on cancer. In fact, the American Cancer Society stated that many future advances against cancer would probably come from this field.

"We have been seeking significant private support to solidify the Hutchinson Center’s position as the world leader in immunotherapy research. The Bezos family has stepped up to that challenge," said Lee Hartwell, Ph.D., Nobel laureate and president and director of the Hutchinson Center.

During the next five years, the Hutchinson Center’s goal is to advance and broaden the field of immunotherapy so that it has the same impact on solid-tumor cancers that bone-marrow transplantation has had on leukemia, boosting survival rates from nearly zero to upwards of 85 percent for certain forms of the disease.

Despite funding limitations, Hutchinson Center scientists have demonstrated the potential of immunotherapy to save lives. In 2008 a research team from the Center’s Clinical Research Division described the first successful use of a human patient’s cloned infection-fighting T cells as the sole therapy to put advanced melanoma tumors into long-term remission. Donations such as the Bezos’ are helping to expand clinical trials that use T-cell therapy to treat advanced tumors.

The gift is the family’s largest private donation to support biomedical research.