Fred Appelbaum receives Lifetime Achievement award

A key member of the team that developed bone marrow transplantation as a successful treatment for leukemia nearly half a century ago, Frederick Appelbaum, MD, was honored on Feb. 18 with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy at the organization’s annual meeting in Orlando, Florida.

“These are my peers. These are the people that I’ve been working with my whole career,” he said in an interview in advance of receiving the award.

Appelbaum is an oncologist and executive vice president of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, where he holds the Metcalfe Family/Frederick Appelbaum Endowed Chair in Cancer Research. In the course of his career, he has witnessed a transplant procedure once performed by him and just a handful of Seattle physicians win widespread acceptance and international acclaim. Worldwide, more than 1.5 million patients have had these potentially lifesaving interventions.

The lifetime achievement award was presented to him in Orlando by ASTCT’s president, Brenda Sandmaier, MD, herself a Fred Hutch expert on blood cancers. She began her own career as a research fellow in Appelbaum’s lab in 1986.

“He is a lifelong transplanter. We know he’s receiving this award for all he has done for science, for patients and for this society,” Sandmaier said.