Newswise — SEATTLE -- Dec. 8, 2016 -- Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center will mark the grand opening of the Bezos Family Immunotherapy Clinic on Dec. 12 with a scientific symposium highlighting promising immunotherapy work. The symposium will be followed by a reception and a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Members of the media are welcome to all events, which are invitation-only to the public. The grand opening will feature leading researchers and executives from Fred Hutch; Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Fred Hutch’s clinical care partner; and Juno Therapeutics, a Seattle-based biotech company focused on developing cellular immunotherapies aimed at curing a broad range of cancers.

The first-of-its-kind clinic will allow researchers to conduct twice as many immunotherapy trials in the next year in pursuit of speeding cures for cancer. Intensive monitoring in the new clinic will enable researchers to better understand why some patients respond to treatment, while others do not, and to achieve the goal of developing the best curative approach to treatment for each individual patient.

“We and scientists worldwide have been working for decades to understand how to harness the power of the immune system,” said Dr. Gary Gilliland, Fred Hutch’s president and director. “Over the last few years we have taken what we have learned in the Hutch’s research labs and started to produce experimental treatments that we now can test; this clinic should inspire hope that we will find cures for cancers once thought incurable.”

Much of the focus at the new clinic, which features 15 patient care suites, is on therapies involving T cells, which play a central role in the immune system. Hutch scientists have been at the forefront of genetically modifying these cells so that they will more effectively target cancers. Clinic staff will take these immune cells from a patient, have the cells specially engineered in a nearby Hutch cell-processing facility, and then re-infuse them to attack the patient’s cancer.

Speakers at the symposium, held from 3 to 5 p.m. in Fred Hutch’s Pelton Auditorium, will discuss how the Hutch’s genetically engineered T-cell products differ from those being tested at other major research centers. The program will begin with welcoming remarks from Gilliland; Dr. Fred Appelbaum, Fred Hutch’s executive vice president and deputy director; Dr. Richard Klausner, Juno director and former director of the National Cancer Institute; Hans Bishop, Juno CEO; and Dr. Stanley Riddell, director of Fred Hutch’s Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center.

There will then be presentations by:

Dr. Rainer Storb, founding member of the Clinical Research Division and head of the Transplantation Biology Program at Fred Hutch, on the history of transplantation, both as a basis for immunotherapy and an example of bench-to-bedside translational research.

Dr. Philip Greenberg, head of the Immunology Program at Fred Hutch, on engineering T cells to seek and destroy cancer.

Dr. Paul Nghiem, head of University of Washington School of Medicine's Dermatology Program and a dermatologist at SCCA, on progress in the management and immunotherapy of Merkel cell carcinoma based on multi-disciplinary collaborative science.

Dr. Cameron Turtle, associate member of the Clinical Research Division, on targeting B cell malignancies with CAR T cells.

• Riddell and Dr. Hyam Levitsky, executive vice president and chief scientific officer at Juno, on the future vision for immunotherapies.

The Hutch’s contributions to the field of immunotherapy can be traced back to its work on bone marrow transplantation, pioneered by Fred Hutch’s Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, who earned a Nobel Prize in 1990. This research led to the first definitive and reproducible example of the human immune system's power to cure cancer: Hutch scientists discovered that healthy donated immune cells, once engrafted, could recognize the patient’s cancer cells as foreign and attack them. Ever since, Fred Hutch has been a leader in immunotherapy, tapping into the immune system to boost survival rates for patients with leukemia and other blood cancers and demonstrating the promise of immunotherapy for treating many other cancers.

The scientific symposium will be followed by a reception from 5 to 6 p.m., sponsored by Juno Therapeutics at the Hutch’s Double Helix Cafe.Dr. David Maloney, the Hutch’s medical director of Cellular Immunotherapy, will speak at the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the clinic in SCCA’s main building on the Hutch campus. He will be joined by a patient whose cancer was put into complete remission by immune therapy administered in a Hutch clinical trial. SCCA funded construction of the new clinic. Juno Therapeutics provides support for the Hutch’s immunotherapy program.

Fred Hutch has licensed to Juno intellectual property for potential treatments that the company seeks to commercialize. The company was launched in December 2013 by the Hutch, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s.

The rapid growth in Hutch-based immunotherapy trials, which prompted the creation of the new clinic, could not have occurred without the Bezos family’s generosity and the support of the many people who joined them. Their collective contributions covered research costs that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to fund through other mechanisms.

Media are asked to register in advance for the Dec. 12 events because of space limitations.