Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is an institution of world renown, deploying nearly 2,800 employees whose mission is to treat and eliminate cancer as a cause of human suffering and death.
The Hutchinson Center is also a leading institution in the research of early cancer detection, which strives to identify the presence of cancer long before symptoms begin, when the opportunity for cure is highest. The Foundation provided $2 million in 2003 to help launch the Center's Early Detection and Intervention Initiative, stimulating additional grants from other funders.
In 2006, the Foundation awarded a $5 million grant to the Center to advance its work on early detection of breast and prostate cancer. Center scientists are testing the theory that biomarkers in the blood can indicate early cancer development with a high degree of accuracy. The Foundation grant is financing work that seeks to show that biomarkers can correlate with the presence of cancer in a mouse, yielding a blueprint for future discoveries relevant to early cancer detection in humans. The resulting knowledge could ultimately shift the emphasis of cancer care away from treatment of advanced disease and toward early detection of cancer in persons known to be susceptible or just starting to develop the disease.
Peter Nelson, M.D., an associate member of the Center's Human Biology Division, serves as the project's scientific coordinator. "This generous gift gives us the tools to demonstrate that specific biomarker-identification strategies can be used to detect breast and prostate cancers prior to clinical symptoms," Nelson said when receiving the grant. "All of us, especially physicians, know the prognosis is best for patients who are diagnosed in the earliest stages of cancer. For example, the five-year survival rate for breast cancer patients with early-stage disease is 85 percent to 95 percent, but it is only 22 percent in patients whose cancer has spread to distant organs, Now we'll be on a fast track to develop blood tests for early diagnosis, which in turn could help us dramatically improve cancer survival rates."
Paul G. Allen, himself a survivor of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, said that through the grant he seeks to strengthen one of the Northwest's leading scientific assets, laying the groundwork for federal and industry involvement in the Hutchinson Center's early cancer-detection research.
"Early cancer detection saves lives," Allen said. "Most of us can cite examples of loved ones who might have survived had their disease been discovered in time. We need more effective early cancer-detection tests and we need them as soon as possible. This grant to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is intended as a catalyst to make that happen earlier and, we hope, save lives."
Web site: www.fhcrc.org
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Photo credit: Dean Forbes
Courtesy of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
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