Every dollar counts

As one of the world's leading biomedical research institutions, we compete for nearly 80 percent of our research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Our creative scientists and our proven track record of innovation and discovery have been a winning combination.

However, as science writer Colleen Steelquist reports in this issue, funds from the NIH have been flat for several years with inflation steadily eroding the amount of money that the United States is investing in medical research. This situation is affecting the entire biomedical community, including Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In some corners, there are concerns we may lose a generation of scientists — not just in the biosciences — if federal funding continues to lag, with bright, young minds seeking other frontiers. Tight federal funding also means that institutions such as the Hutchinson Center have to work harder to recruit new scientists and raise more private money to fund their research.

The Hutchinson Center remains a very healthy organization, and our scientists continue to break new ground. Take Dr. Cassian Yee's work, featured in this issue as well. Yee works with T-cells in the emerging field of adoptive immunotherapy. His research recently made international news when one of his patients went into long-term remission from stage 4 melanoma.

Yee and his colleagues removed CD4+ T-cells, a type of white blood cell, from a 52-year-old man whose cancer spread to a groin lymph node and to a lung. The T-cells were then cloned and multiplied and infused into the patient. Within a couple of months, scans showed no tumors.

Sometimes, cures and tools to fight cancer and other diseases come from unlikely places. In "Nature's Brew," writer Roger van Oosten takes us deep in the Amazon forest and to a local Seattle park to show us the unlikely sources for cancer-fighting compounds. One of our researchers, Dr. Jim Olson, will travel to Australia next year to look for anti-cancer compounds among that country's spiders and scorpions. Already, Olson has been working successfully with a compound derived from scorpion venom that some day may be used to target brain cancer cells.

It's the kind of research that we encourage and foster at the Hutchinson Center, but it can be discouraging for our researchers to be slowed down in their search for cures by the ever-decreasing national commitment to biomedical research. With your continued financial support, we can ensure that our work never slows down.