What Your Dollars Support

Last spring, you had the opportunity to partake in an evening of palate-pleasing dishes created by local chefs and expertly paired with magnificent Northwest wines at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Premier Chefs Dinner. It was also an opportunity to play an invaluable role in moving world-class research forward at the Hutchinson Center.

Private support, including more than $522,000 raised at the 2011 Premier Chefs Dinner, allows Center investigators to pursue novel research opportunities that might otherwise go unrealized. Your contributions have been integral to their efforts in the area of pancreas cancer research and beyond, and we are pleased to share with you some of their recent advances.

Tackling a deadly foe

The most uniformly devastating of all major cancers, pancreas cancer is notoriously difficult to treat and quickly lethal for the vast majority of patients. In most cases, tumors spread too rapidly for surgical removal and are resistant to even the most potent chemotherapy drugs. New approaches for battling pancreas cancer are desperately needed.

In 2009, the Hutchinson Center’s Dr. Sunil Hingorani was part of an international research team that uncovered certain characteristics of pancreas tumors that contribute to their drug resistance — and hit on an entirely new strategy for targeting the disease. The team found that not only is pancreas tumor tissue extremely dense — each individual cancer cell is surrounded by a thick conglomeration of fibrous proteins — it also possesses an unusually sparse network of blood vessels. Together, these features insulate pancreas cancer cells, preventing the chemotherapy from penetrating and spreading within the tumor.

Dr. Hingorani and his colleagues used their innovative laboratory model of human pancreas cancer to show that by blocking production of the cancer cells’ dense surrounding tissue, they could increase blood flow to the tumor and significantly improve the chemotherapy’s ability to infiltrate and destroy the cancer.

With your support, Dr. Hingorani is now building on these landmark results. He is using the laboratory model to investigate a promising new method that relies on modified versions of naturally occurring enzymes to break down existing tumor tissue and help chemotherapy reach the cancerous cells inside. In addition to preclinical studies, Dr. Hingorani is spearheading a global clinical trial of the novel approach that is now enrolling patients with advanced pancreas cancer. Encouraging data from these initial studies could lead to the development of a less toxic and potentially much more effective treatment option for the many thousands of patients suffering from this deadly disease.

Lifesaving advances

Pancreas cancer isn’t the only field in which our investigators are leading the way to breakthroughs. Across the Center, dedicated scientists and staff are leveraging your support to advance knowledge that will benefit those with and at risk for cancer.

Progress in understanding breast cancer

In two separate studies, Dr. Amanda Phipps and colleagues found that giving birth more times, having a higher body mass index, and being less physically active all increase the risk of triple-negative breast cancer, a rare but aggressive disease subtype. Although never giving birth appears to lower the risk of triple-negative breast cancer, the team found that women who remain childless have about a 40 percent higher risk of the more common estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer. Together, the findings highlight the fact that breast cancer is really a complex combination of many diseases, which must all be better understood in order to enhance prevention, detection and treatment.

Safer therapy for brain cancer patients

Dr. Hans-Peter Kiem and colleagues have developed an approach that could make chemotherapy safer and more effective for brain cancer patients. The team introduced a chemotherapy-resistant gene into cells that give rise to the bone marrow and blood, which are particularly vulnerable to the toxic effects of chemotherapy, and then gave those modified cells to patients with glioblastoma, a terminal form of brain cancer. The results to date are encouraging. By shielding patients from side effects that normally limit the amount of anti-cancer drugs that can be administered, this novel approach could enable doctors to use existing therapy more effectively and potentially improve patient survival.

Improving cancer survivorship

A decade of work by Center researchers to refine marrow and stem cell transplantation for patients with blood cancers has significantly reduced the risk of treatment-related complications and death. A recent study compared patient outcomes in the mid-‘90s with those a decade later and revealed a 60 percent reduction in the risk of death within 200 days of transplant and a 41 percent reduction in the risk of overall mortality at any time after transplant. The data show clearly that the collective efforts of our dedicated researchers have significantly boosted the chances of long-term survival for our patients.

Thank you

Thank you, Premier Chefs Dinner supporters, for your generous investment in promising research at the Hutchinson Center. Your contributions help sustain the pioneering efforts of our researchers every day as they endeavor to improve the lives of those with cancer and related diseases.