The waiting room of the brand-new Bezos Family Immunotherapy Clinic was packed on Monday as philanthropists, scientific leadership, patients and families celebrated the one-of-its-kind facility’s grand opening.
The opening of the clinic ― named in honor of the Bezos family’s dedicated commitment to immunotherapy research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center ― was marked by a scientific symposium at Fred Hutch and a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the clinic on the sixth floor of Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
“This is built on many years of discoveries about the human immune system,” much of them at Fred Hutch, the clinic’s medical director, the Hutch’s Dr. David Maloney, said in his opening remarks at the ribbon-cutting.
When the green ribbon stretched across the clinic’s front desk was ceremonially cut, it was one of Maloney’s former immunotherapy patients who held the scissors. Lymphoma survivor Stephanie Florence was treated with genetically engineered, cancer-targeting immune cells on a Fred Hutch clinical trial. She has now been cancer-free for 18 months.
The research at the Hutch “has given me my life,” said the Lewiston, Idaho resident. At the point she enrolled on the trial, her cancer had come back despite multiple conventional therapies, including a transplant of blood-forming stem cells. “It’s almost like winning the lottery every day for the past 18 months.”
Dedicated to providing immunotherapies for cancer patients in clinical trials, the facility enables intensive monitoring of each patient to help scientists understand why some respond to experimental immune therapies and others do not, with the goal of developing curative approaches for every person with cancer ― “bench to bedside then back to the lab and back to the clinic,” Maloney said.
While Florence received her experimental treatment before the clinic opened, all of the new participants in her clinical trial are now seen there, as well as participants on four other trials. Next year, the Hutch anticipates 12 trials, thanks to the doubled patient capacity the clinic offers. There have been more than 200 patient visits so far to the 9,222-square foot facility since its soft opening in October, said Maloney, who holds the Leonard and Norma Klorfine Endowed Chair for Clinical Research.
And this week, the first patient seen at the new clinic completes therapy and heads home. Her advanced, treatment-resistant leukemia is in complete remission, Maloney said.
“As a physician, nothing is more encouraging,” he said. “But there’s much more to do … and that’s why this clinic is so important.”
‘Superpowering’ patients’ own immune systems
Philanthropists Jackie and Mike Bezos were joined at the ceremony by their family, including their son, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, and their daughter, Christina. Maloney gave the family a tour of clinic, whose gleaming white walls and cool blue accents Maloney says his patients tell him is reminiscent of an Apple store.
Jackie made remarks on behalf of the family before she and her husband joined Florence, Maloney, and other Hutch and SCCA leadership to cut the ribbon.
“Our investment in the Hutch is really an investment in the researchers, the scientists, the people who come here for treatment — everybody who walks the floors of the Hutch,” said Jackie Bezos.
“This is a place where miracles happen,” she said.
Standing in front of the sign bearing her family’s name and the green ceremonial ribbon, she remembered how it all began.
In 2008, a friend brought Jackie and Mike to Fred Hutch to meet with scientists working on a new approach to curing cancer. Jackie recalled an “electrified” feeling in the room, and they were fascinated by the Hutch’s plan: “superpowering” patients’ own immune systems to fight their cancers.
As they walked back to the car following this meeting, Jackie said “Mike, I think they’re onto something.”
In the years that followed, the family’s generous philanthropic investments spurred the growth of the program at Fred Hutch and made it possible to launch new experimental treatment approaches from the laboratory into the clinic.
“The Bezos family has been such partners in the development of all this,” said Fred Hutch Executive Vice President and Deputy Director Dr. Fred Appelbaum. “Without them, it would not have happened.”
‘Driven by the science’
The research behind those clinical decisions was on display at the scientific symposium held at Fred Hutch before the ribbon-cutting.
“We are here because of decades of hard work, driven by the science,” said Fred Hutch President and Director Dr. Gary Gilliland at the symposium.
Speakers at the event led the audience through the development of immunotherapy through ongoing clinical trials at Fred Hutch. Highlights included:
- Dr. Rainer Storb, head of Transplantation Biology at the Hutch, who recalled how bone marrow transplantation went from a fringe idea, abandoned by most scientists, to a mainstay of therapy for blood cancer disorders, thanks to research at Fred Hutch. He and colleagues are now pushing the boundaries of transplantation further, tackling life-threatening complications and reducing the risk of relapse.
- Dr. Phil Greenberg, the Hutch scientist who is so engrossed in immunotherapy research that his license plate reads “DRTCELL.” Greenberg gave updates on his team’s development of T-cell therapies for a variety of cancers, from pancreatic cancer to high-risk, acute leukemia.
- Hutch affiliate Dr. Paul Nghiem, whose research has recently helped to establish an immune-boosting drug as a treatment for the rare and extremely deadly skin cancer Merkel cell carcinoma, a cancer that has no FDA-approved therapies. “Almost all these responses [in a recent Phase 2 trial] are durable,” Nghiem said, a “really, really encouraging” finding in a disease that chemotherapy can only keep at bay for an average of three months.
- Dr. Cameron Turtle, one of the leaders of lymphoma survivor Stephanie Florence’s trial. Turtle walked the audience through the data from that trial so far, including “very encouraging” early results in leukemia released last week.
The new Bezos Family Immunotherapy Clinic was launched with support from SCCA, the Hutch’s clinical care partner, and Juno Therapeutics, the cellular immunotherapy biotech that is a spinoff of Fred Hutch, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s Hospital. Fred Hutch has licensed to Juno intellectual property for potential treatments that the company seeks to commercialize.
The “most remarkable thing” about immunotherapy, said Juno CEO Hans Bishop, who spoke at the symposium, “is how extraordinary some of those early successes are, yet we know so little about the mechanisms.”
The new clinic will allow researchers to study each patient extensively to figure out these riddles and improve experimental immunotherapies, speakers said. Hutch immunotherapy researcher Dr. Stan Riddell pointed out that this is just what Storb and his colleagues did during their development of transplantation.
“This [new immunotherapy] unit is designed to help find the principles of using the immune system to treat and cure cancer,” said Riddell. This type of in-depth research “was and is the reason transplant was so successful,” he said.
“What we need is a place to do the kind of intensive research we need to cure [patients’] disease,” Riddell said.
“And that’s what this is all about.”
Susan Keown is a staff writer at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Before joining Fred Hutch in 2014, Susan wrote about health and research topics for a variety of research institutions, including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reach her at skeown@fredhutch.org or follow her on Twitter at @sejkeown.
For information about participating in a cancer clinical trial, please contact Fred Hutch’s clinical care partner, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, or email intake@seattlecca.org. Another good resource about clinical trials is the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Information Service, which can be reached at 1.800.4.CANCER. The phone line is staffed from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET Monday through Friday.
