Evergreen Fund awardees

Research teams at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center will receive in-house grants this year from the Evergreen Fund, a unique program to boost scientific projects deemed promising enough in their early stages to attract potential commercial partners later on.

Dr. Jim Boonyaratanakornkit, acting assistant professor (Allergy and Infectious Diseases) will receive a second Beyond Pilot grant to continue work that was boosted with a similar grant in 2020. This year, his grant will help him and his team to enhance existing laboratory-designed antibodies, including those developed with the help of that first grant.

Another Beyond Pilot award winner this year is Dr. Kevin Cheung, associate professor (Medical Oncology), whose team is developing a monoclonal antibody drug to block necrosis, the formation of dead zones within a breast cancer tumor.

Dr. Stefan Radtke and colleagues, in collaboration with Dr. Hans-Peter Kiem, professor (Medical Oncology), will use their Beyond Pilot funding to develop further a suite of laboratory and clinical innovations that would help make possible “in vivo” gene therapies — where genetic changes are made inside the patient rather than in the lab — with the potential to cure HIV/AIDS and life-threatening blood disorders.

Dr. Roland Walter, professor (Hematology) and his team won a Beyond Pilot award for their project to develop a targeted radioimmunotherapy for adults with acute leukemia.

Graduate student Karthikeya Gottimukkala and Dr. Jennifer Adair, research associate professor (Medical Oncology), received Pilot funding for a project to develop a new generation of nanoparticles as vehicles for transporting molecular-scale gene-editing tools into human cells.