Photo courtesy Fong Lab at Fred Hutch
Funding to Fred Hutch Cancer Center supports studies of the immune system in cancer and autoimmune diseases as well as the development of new cell therapies for cancers. The projects will use leading-edge tools to examine immune cells and the tissues that surround them to uncover how to treat diseases and prevent side effects from treatments. The work builds on Fred Hutch’s 50-year-history of world-wide leadership in using the immune system to fight disease and improve human health. We recently caught up with Dr. Lawrence Fong, scientific director of Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center.
Dr. Lawrence Fong spent his formative years with his brother tinkering with computers in their Northern California garage, dreaming up new technologies and applications. That’s why, as an incoming freshman at Columbia College, his sights were set on computer science when life threw him a curveball.
“My father had been diagnosed with lymphoma – a disease I had never heard of – and he passed away during my sophomore year,” Dr. Fong recalled. “For me, that was a clear demonstration of the huge unmet need with our conventional cancer treatments. We all felt so helpless.”
So, Dr. Fong pivoted. He went to Stanford Medical School where he had great immunology professors and where he first learned “maybe we can use the immune system to treat cancer” – something he called at the time “a pipe dream.” Which is perhaps why he jokes that he is, indeed, “living the dream.”
Now, as scientific director of Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, he and his colleagues are making scientific discoveries that he is certain would have changed his father’s outcome had they been available.
“We’re delivering transformative therapies, which was one of the motivations for me to move to the Hutch,” explained Dr. Fong, who is also the Bezos Family Distinguished Scholar in Immunotherapy at Fred Hutch. “Now we need to ratchet up what we’re doing and it’s so amazing that FFST came in and asked us to go for the big ideas – to accelerate iterative science and to advance therapies for patients.”
Dr. Fong describes the work being funded by the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST) that builds on the ability to digitize the immune system within a blood or tissue sample. He hails this as a significant leap from what has been done in the past.
“Where before, we focused on a few specific cell populations, like T cells or myeloid cells. Now, we can digitize all the cell types in their totality with a patient sample so we can leverage machine learning and AI to analyze them,” said Dr. Fong. “That allows us to delve into not only what our treatments are doing, but understand why some patients might benefit from a treatment and why other patients may not. We can actually let the data tell us what is going on and help identify what additional therapeutic targets should be.”
Dr. Fong indicated that this approach builds a therapeutic road map through data, not conjecture. Digitization provides additional benefits in terms of cost, time and volume as well- not unlike when we first sequenced the human genome that took 13 years and $3 billion to complete. Now, the sequencing takes a few days for a few thousand dollars.
“Same with assessing patient samples – in the past we would think about a handful of blood or tissue samples but now we’ve gotten to a scale where we’re looking at hundreds of patients and multiple time points from those patients – before treatment, during treatment and at the time the disease is either responding or not,” he said. “It’s giving us a whole other dimension in terms of how we can learn how to make better therapies.”
Dr. Fong is particularly grateful for FFST’s support of Fred Hutch’s big, audacious proposal that is not fundable by conventional sources. “Governmental and academic funding sources typically prioritize incremental science, where they give you a grant after you’ve demonstrated you can actually do the experiment so that you can do the experiment again,” he lamented. “Our proposal applies machine learning and AI to discover new methodologies in disease therapeutics – a proposition that is basically ‘unfundable.’”
He sees the grant as also a testament to Fred Hutch as an institution committed to transformative treatments, something he has actually experienced and is not just rhetoric from marketing materials.
“I came to an institution where they’re not afraid of swinging for the fences since they already have developed transformative treatments and are in it for the long game,” he said. “I proposed different elements that I think are necessary and instead of asking if I was insane, which might have been the case prior to the Hutch, the response was, ‘yes, we want to propel discoveries that way.’”
He also came to a city, Seattle, where collaboration among biomedical organizations has generated a world-class research ecosystem. A keystone strategy embraced by the foundation, collaboration builds on and accelerates discovery.
“As we were discussing this grant, a suggested goal was elevating the Seattle ecosystem to the reputation level that San Francisco and Boston have built,” Dr. Fong recalled as he noted how well known those markets are for world-class bioscience research. “I had to chuckle given the talent, resources, and amazing science that's happening here.”
Dr. Fong fits in well with Seattle’s emerging reputation for innovative leadership in bioscience. Built from the work ethic instilled by his father and motivated by his father’s disease, it is so appropriate that he is using his early love of technology in the quest to find cures for incurable diseases.
Fred Hutch scientists are using advanced spatial transcriptomics and proteomics to study tissues in detail to reveal how immune and non-immune cells interact in ways that cause disease or treatment resistance, paving the way for new therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Additionally, researchers are looking to improve innovative cell therapies such as bone marrow transplants, tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), CAR T cells, and TCR T cells. By studying how cells behave in relation to treatment success or side effects, scientists can design next-generation cell therapies with built-in features to overcome current limitations.