Fred Hutch

11/22/2025

Earlier this month, Fred Hutch’s Dr. Scott Ramsey dedicated the Value In Cancer Care summit to patient advocate and Cierra Sisters Inc. founder Bridgette Hempstead, who died of metastatic breast cancer last December. “Bridgette was an inexhaustible reservoir of energy. She was passionate about raising awareness about the problems that Black patients with cancer are facing. She inspired me, she challenged me, but she always uplifted me. As she did with everyone she met.”

Read more about the summit: https://bit.ly/4odLNO9

11/21/2025

“Our ultimate vision is whole person care,” said Fred Hutch Cancer Center’s Veena Shankaran, MD, MS, in her opening remarks at the Value in Cancer Care (VCC) Summit, held Thursday, November 6, at Seattle’s Bell Harbor International Conference Center. “But there are barriers.”

Patients struggle with navigating insurance benefits, financial stress, burnout and treatment side effects, she said, while providers have to deal with administrative overload, prior authorization, charting and EHR (electronic health record) frustrations.

Unfortunately, these and other challenges are “set against the backdrop of … a data tsunami in health care, especially oncology,” Shankaran said, pointing to precision medicine and genomics, adoption of AI in clinical care and the ever-increasing amount of information patients and providers need to consume and understand.

The VCC conference, put on by the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research, or HICOR, focused on many of these challenges with speakers and attendees digging into burnout; information overload; pain management and substance use; the escalating costs of care, as well as mistrust, misinformation and missed care opportunities, particularly in the realm of palliative medicine.

But the annual “meeting with a mission” also offered practical solutions, valuable insights, a raft of resources and proven methods to help overcome, or at least ameliorate, many of them.

Read more: https://bit.ly/3XDKop3

11/20/2025

Many people are taking the step to quit smoking today for the Great American Smokeout. Here is a very important piece of advice that will lead you on your path to be to***co free: before you quit smoking, figure out your reason for quitting. Is it for your family? Your health? Whatever it is, it will be your north star guiding you when times get tough.
There are many resources for you to quit smoking, here are a couple:
1. Chatbot developed by Dr. Jonathan Bricker: https://quitbot.net/
2. NCI's cancer information center where you can speak with a trained specialist: https://www.cancer.gov/contact

11/19/2025

The cost of caregiving for patients with cancer can be measured in countless ways: emotionally, professionally, financially and in terms of time, to name a few.

As a caregiver for her teen son and then her husband, both diagnosed with different types of lymphoma, Jean Bryant knows as well as anyone about the toll of being a caregiver for someone with cancer.

In the wake of a cancer diagnosis, the focus is rightly on the patient. But November is National Family Caregivers Month, which offers an opportunity to expand the spotlight to encompass the army of caregivers who do everything from take notes during medical visits, keep loved ones company during long hours of chemotherapy and care for them at home as they cope with side effects from grueling treatments.

Read more: https://bit.ly/3XC9k0a

11/19/2025

In honor of the late Dr. Eddie Méndez, Fred Hutch is seeking applications for the 8th Annual Dr. Eddie Méndez Scholar Award which recognizes outstanding and diverse postdocs who are conducting cancer, infectious disease or basic science research. Learn more & apply: https://apply.interfolio.com/176955

11/18/2025

Recently Fred Hutch employees with 35, 40, 45 and 50 years of service were honored at a luncheon celebrating their commitment and lasting impact at the organization.

Joanne Quinn, a registered nurse in the Blood and Marrow Transplant Program who has been at Fred Hutch for 35 years, fought back tears while recalling her patients.

"My most cherished memories are the patients who return for their one-year, Long-Term Follow-Up evaluation who ask to see me, because we shared a crisis in their lives together and they survived," she shared. "That connection is deep and enduring."

https://bit.ly/481a03V

On Oct. 9, 2025, Fred Hutch Cancer Center employees with decades of service were honored at a luncheon celebrating their commitment and lasting impact at the organization. This year, Fred Hutch is also celebrating its 50th anniversary.

11/17/2025

Health History Month is a powerful reminder that understanding your family’s health history — and getting genetic testing — can be lifesaving.

Fred Hutch’s latest story features patients whose lives were changed by germline genetic testing, and it also spotlights Dr. Heather Cheng, recently named Clinical Director of Cancer Genetics at Fred Hutch.

Dr. Cheng leads efforts to identify inherited cancer risk variants and connect patients with targeted treatments and clinical trials. Her work is transforming how we approach cancer prevention and care for patients and their families.

Read the full story: https://bit.ly/4pW3vI7

11/17/2025

Your sense of smell works thanks to a remarkable system of receptors — and Dr. Linda Buck helped uncover how it all functions.

A Nobel laureate and professor in Fred Hutch’s Basic Sciences Division, she discovered hundreds of odorant receptors and mapped how scent signals are routed from nose to brain.

Explore more of her research: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/faculty-lab-directory/buck-linda.html

“Do something that you’re obsessed with, that you just have to understand, because that’s where the joy comes from, and that also, I think, is where the great discoveries come from,” said medicine laureate Linda Buck.

Together with Richard Axel in 1991, she discovered how hundreds of genes in our DNA code for the odorant sensors located in the olfactory sensory neurons in our noses.

Their work shed light on the olfactory process step by step to the very heart of what makes us human: our perceptions, preferences and memories.

Learn more about their work: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2004/summary/

11/16/2025

A study published this week in JAMA Oncology was the first to look at how ultraprocessed foods may influence the development of colorectal polyps in people under 50, adding important context to the larger question of why colorectal cancer rates are rising in younger people.

But the study also had limitations, said Dr. Marian Neuhouser, a nutritional epidemiologist at Fred Hutch who was not involved in the study. It was challenging for the researchers to determine if certain foods (like waffles, pies and popcorn) were technically ultraprocessed or made from scratch, which could make the results less reliable, she told The New York Times.

Still, the conclusion does track with recent research on adults of all ages. A handful of studies from the last five years have consistently found links between diets high in ultraprocessed foods and precancerous polyps and colorectal cancer.

Read more: https://nyti.ms/3M1ZfXL

The study’s findings track with recent research on the alarming rise of the cancer in younger adults.

11/15/2025

Frogs have made significant contributions to Fred Hutch science over the years, but Xenopus has been absent from the menagerie for about two decades. For various reasons, researchers moved on to biological questions best answered by working with other model organisms such as baker’s yeast, tiny worms, fruit flies and zebrafish

Arimura has brought Xenopus back to Fred Hutch for a new era of science because their eggs provide the molecular materials that he needs to make chromosomes in a test tube that look and behave like chromosomes formed naturally within a cell.

He uses the frog-made materials to figure out the structure of protein complexes that interact with DNA to form chromatin — the mixture of DNA and DNA-packaging proteins that cells use to choose which genes are activated and to make exact copies of themselves.

Mutations to those complexes play a role in cancer and other diseases, so Arimura wants to understand how chromatin structures regulate cellular differentiation, diseases and clinical treatments.
Finding the three-dimensional shapes of chromatin’s protein complexes matters because the way the proteins fold determines their function. For example, if you open a spring-driven watch and observe the shapes of the parts inside, you can infer how each part works.

Those functions change at different stages of the cell cycle, working one way when cells are growing and another way when cells are preparing to divide.
But figuring out the shape of these protein complexes at different stages of the cell cycle presents many obstacles. They’re tiny and not abundant enough when extracted from frog eggs to generate clear images using standard electron microscopy techniques.

However, Arimura brought more than a new generation of frogs to Fred Hutch.

He also brought a new method he invented that overcomes those obstacles, which advances the field of structural biology and creates new opportunities for collaboration.

🐸 Hop to the link in bio to read more.

11/15/2025

As chief medical officer, Tom Purcell, MD, MBA, is the clinical leader of Fred Hutch Cancer Center. In this role, Purcell eats, sleeps and breathes the importance of quality care in determining patient experience and outcomes. “When I wake up in the morning, my main goal is to improve our ability to deliver the best cancer care available,” he said.

Purcell is overseeing an organization-wide initiative to improve the delivery of care, with the goal of expanding operations to create capacity for more patients in the community who need access to the expertise of a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center like Fred Hutch.

In this Q&A, he shares details about the initiative’s key focus areas: patient access, clinical care model and capacity: https://bit.ly/3XAQkz3

11/15/2025

What makes Obliteride, Fred Hutch Cancer Center’s annual bike ride, 5K walk/run and fundraiser, so amazing? For the thousands of participants who joined this season, it begins with a personal commitment to scientific discovery and a collective goal to cure cancer faster.

Add in plenty of cheers, connection and heart on Obliteride Weekend, August 8 and 9 in Seattle, and the result is powerful: This week, Fred Hutch announced that in 2025, the Obliteride community raised $9.2 million for groundbreaking research. This amount brings Obliteride’s cumulative fundraising total to more than $67 million. Every dollar participants raise supports advances in cancer prevention, detection, treatment and cures at Fred Hutch, thanks to event sponsors and supporters.

Read more: https://bit.ly/4p9Xs1b

Today, Fred Hutch announced that in 2025 the Obliteride community raised $9.2 million for groundbreaking research. This amount brings Obliteride's cumulative fundraising total to more than $67 million. Every dollar participants raise supports advances i...