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Cancer patients in rural areas of the United States die of their disease at significantly higher rates than those residing in U.S. cities, and scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle are trying to find out why. Now, they have uncovered an important clue.

This week, they and colleagues at SWOG, a network of cancer researchers from 47 states, published evidence that when rural and urban patients receive identical care — as participants do in carefully controlled clinical trials — those alarming differences in survival rates virtually vanish.

“When patients are enrolled in clinical trials, where patients are uniformly assessed, treated and followed under strict, best-practice protocols, there was almost no difference in survival rates between rural and urban cancer patients,” said Dr. Joseph Unger, the Fred Hutch health services researcher and biostatistician who led the study.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has received a $1.26 million, five-year Science Education Partnership Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, or NIGMS. The award will fund a new science education and training program called “Frontiers in Cancer Research,” which will focus on:

• inspiring secondary school students from underrepresented communities to pursue biomedical and clinical research careers;
• developing and piloting cancer-focused curricula and hands-on science kit resources that highlight ethical issues around genetic engineering, gene therapy, clinical trials and Fred Hutch’s breakthrough research; and
• providing professional development and mentored research experiences for life science teachers on fundamental biological principles and practices through the lens of cancer research.

In 1987, at the age of 40, world-renowned Spanish tenor José Carreras was diagnosed with an acute form of leukemia and given long odds of survival. He underwent a bone marrow transplant at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that would cure his disease. A year later, in gratitude, he established a Barcelona-based foundation to support and promote the kind of research that saved his life. That research was pioneered by Fred Hutch’s Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, who received a Nobel Prize in 1990 for developing BMT.

Today, three decades later, the lives of Carreras and Thomas, who died in 2012 at the age of 90, continue to be intertwined through an endowed chair named in their honor that was established in 2007 by the Seattle-based Friends of José Carreras International Leukemia Foundation.

Hematologist Dr. Geoffrey Hill, a physician-scientist who was recently recruited from Australia to lead Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation at Fred Hutch, is the third and most recent recipient of the José Carreras/E. Donnall Thomas Endowed Chair for Cancer Research. The chair provides $425,000 in total funding over five years. Hill is also the third recipient of the brown wooden captain’s-style chair originally owned by Thomas.