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Immunotherapy

Hutchinson Center researchers are renowned for developing successful treatments that harness the immune system to fight cancer, much as it naturally eliminates everyday infections like the common cold.

The Hutchinson Center's Nobel Prize-winning work on bone marrow transplantation provided the first example of the human immune system's power to cure cancer. Today, we continue to lead this revolutionary field, called immunotherapy, which yields effective cancer treatments with far fewer side effects than conventional drugs, radiation or surgery.

We've already used immunotherapy to boost survival rates for patients with leukemia and other blood cancers. And we've shown it has promise for treating aggressive skin and kidney cancers.

We're uniquely poised to apply this revolutionary approach to thousands more patients who suffer from breast, ovarian, prostate and other common cancers. Our treatment arm, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, is using immunotherapy in treatments for a variety of cancers. Our goal is to have the same impact on these cancers that bone marrow transplantation has had on leukemia.

: Immunotherapy uses infection-fighting T-cells to wipe out cancer

What is immunotherapy?

Immunotherapy is an innovative new treatment approach that empowers the human immune system to fight off cancer and other debilitating diseases.

The immune system—a complex network that includes disease-fighting cells and proteins—is well-known for its remarkable ability to locate, recognize and attack illnesses like the common cold. By nature, however, the parts of the immune system that can kill cancer cells are very rare.

Thanks to continually evolving research, scientists have discovered new ways to find these special cancer destroyers and enlist them to seek out and destroy tumor cells.

The most exciting part? Because immunotherapies harness the patient’s own immune system, they are far less likely to produce the painful side effects common to traditional cancer treatments.

Lifesaving discoveries

Some of the world’s most significant immunotherapy breakthroughs have occurred at the Hutchinson Center. Our researchers were the first to show that rare disease-fighting cells called T-cells can be extracted from patients, multiplied in large quantities and infused back into patients. Our scientists have established that this method can boost the body's ability to fight viral diseases, such as cytomegalovirus and HIV, and cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma, melanoma and breast cancer.

: Dr. Stanley Riddell

Fred Hutch researchers used a melanoma patient’s own cloned T-cells to put his cancer into long-term remission. Two years after a 52-year-old Oregon man received an infusion of 5 billion copies of his own CD4+ T-cells, a type of white blood cell that attacks a protein associated with his cancer, he continued to be cancer-free.

Dr. Stanley Riddell and colleagues have advanced a related approach by discovering a rare subset of T-cells capable of surviving in patients for extended periods, providing a long-lasting, renewable source of cancer-fighting immune cells. The identification of these "central memory" T-cells is a breakthrough that promises to dramatically improve the clinical success of T-cell therapy.