About the Consortium

The Fred Hutchinson/University of Washington Cancer Consortium is a research collaboration comprising Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center since 1976, and its strong collaborators, the University of Washington, Seattle Children's, and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Fred Hutchinson's designation by the National Cancer Institute as a comprehensive cancer center was expanded to include the Consortium in 2003. See profiles of participating institutions.

While the participating institutions remain independent, the Consortium combines their strengths to accelerate research progress in the fight against cancer and develop premier research programs across many types of cancer.

The Consortium brings together over 400 faculty with research interests in basic, clinical, and public health sciences related to cancer, with total NCI funding of $97.6 million in 2009. Highlights from 2008-2009 are summarized in the Year 35 Progress Report (November 2009).

Faculty in the Consortium are organized into 13 productive research programs with emphasis in:

• Public health (Biostatistics, Cancer Prevention, Epidemiology)
• Clinical research (Clinical Transplantation, Transplantation Biology)
• Fundamental sciences (Basic Sciences, Genome Instability, Stem/Progenitor Cell Biology)
• Programs that impact all three disciplines (Cancer Imaging; GI Cancer Etiology, Risk, & Detection; Immunology and Vaccine Development; Prostate Cancer; Women’s Cancer).

In addition, the Consortium has developing programs in Computational Biology, Molecular Diagnostics, Pediatric Oncology, and Viral Pathogenesis. There are also three affinity groups in neuro-oncology, thoracic/head & neck, and behavioral and outcomes research.

The Consortium's senior leadership has identified seven areas that require continuing resource commitment in order to fully exploit the opportunities arising for advances in cancer outcomes:

• Strengthening the Consortium's clinical research programs and infrastructure to permit more rapid development of diagnostics and therapeutics
• Strengthening the Consortium's presence in genetics and genomics
• Strengthening our developing program in computational biology by recruiting additional computational biologists and providing more computational shared resources to faculty
• Continuing our commitment to early cancer detection through improvements in protein biomarker discovery and molecular diagnostics
• Building on our leadership in research on infectious diseases and virology and developing a program focusing on infectious agents and cancer
• Continuing to recruit promising new laboratory scientists in broad areas of basic biology
• Continuing to encourage and support a focus on aging for the programs where it is especially relevant