Bezos family pledges $10 million to Hutch for cancer research |
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Bezos family pledges $10 million to Hutch for cancer research
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center/Photo by Dean Forbes
The parents of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos are taking the plunge into biomedical research. Jackie and Mike Bezos are pledging $10 million to Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to advance the study of immunotherapy to fight cancer.
Jackie Bezos described the gift this way:
We chose to support the Hutchinson Center because it is a world leader in immunotherapy, which wields the power of the immune system to reprogram the body's army of infection-fighting T cells to be laser focused on fighting a particular illness. The first target - and it's a big one - is cancer. But the potential for using immunotherapy to treat other diseases, including those of the autoimmune system, are tremendous.
Immunotherapy seeks to enhance or modify the the body's natural immune system to help it fight disease. The Bezos are structuring the gift as a challenge to encourage other grants. The Bezos' pledge of $10 million requires matching gifts totaling $10 million over a three-year period, ending Dec. 31, 2012, said Hutchinson spokeswoman Kristen Woodward.
The Bezos family gift is one of the top five gifts in the history of the Hutchinson Center. It's a direct gift from Jackie and Mike Bezos and is separate from the Bezos Family Foundation, which primarily supports education projects, Woodward said.
Hutchinson Center president Lee Hartwell said the Bezos family gift will help the center recruit top scientists, develop new immunological drugs and test them in clinical trials.
This summer Hutch researcher Cassian Yee successfully used a "human patient's cloned infection-fighting T cells as the sole therapy to put advanced melanoma tumors into long-term remission," according to the Hutch, which said Yee's team is now "expanding clinical trials that use T-cell therapy to treat advanced tumors."
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