Mike Rubin will always remember April Fool’s Day in 1987. On that day, he received a life-saving bone marrow transplant. No joke.
The transplant also reshaped the trajectory of his life, prompting him to relocate from New York City to Seattle, where he received a transplant at Fred Hutch Cancer Center to treat his leukemia. Nearly four decades later, Rubin has come full circle: instead of receiving gifts, he now solicits them as senior director of philanthropic gifts at Fred Hutch.
In that role, Rubin relies on his personal story to connect with donors. One donor in particular — his father — had an especially keen understanding of the impact of private support.
Five years ago, Milton Rubin created the Milton B. Rubin Family Endowed Chair to express his gratitude for the care his son received at Fred Hutch decades back. An executive in institutional investment management, Milton Rubin said that endowing a chair allows him to increase his support for Fred Hutch in a meaningful way.
“It’s only through research that we experienced an outcome that was very favorable for Michael,” he said.
The inaugural recipient, Rainer Storb, MD, helped create and refine blood stem cell transplantation as a treatment for blood disorders, cementing Fred Hutch’s reputation as a transplant leader. Storb also contributed to the understanding and treatment of graft-vs.-host disease, or GVHD, a common post-transplant complication.
Storb, who recently retired from leading a lab at 90 and is now a Fred Hutch emeritus faculty member, is being honored with a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Hematology.
The new holder of the chair, Madhav Dhodapkar, MBBS, is the scientific director of Fred Hutch’s Multiple Myeloma Program. He previously led the Winship Center for Cancer Immunology at Emory University.
Dhodapkar believes that a cure for multiple myeloma is possible. Multiple myeloma is cancer of the bone marrow and is characterized by cancer cells that pop up throughout the body as cancerous plasma cells overtake healthy blood cells.
Dhodapkar is new to Fred Hutch but not new to scientific research. For years, his lab has been studying the biology of multiple myeloma as well as some basic science aspects of human immunology.
“It’s gratifying to see immune-based approaches, some originating in part from what we were studying years ago, now becoming mainstream for how we treat this specific cancer,” said Dhodapkar. “It has led to major improvements and outcomes for our patients, but the work is not done, and we still have a way to go. The support that this chair brings will allow us to extend our research to new horizons outside the scope of our current funding.”
Dhodapkar’s optimism regarding a cure for multiple myeloma stems from the development of a raft of new therapies that can achieve a higher tumor cell kill rate. To date, many so-called “functional cures” have turned the disease into a chronic condition to be managed with medication over time. But Dhodapkar believes the emergence of new therapies including T-cell engagers, antibodies designed to guide immune system T cells to destroy cancerous cells, and CAR T-cell therapy, which similarly engineers T cells to seek out and kill identified cancer cells, will make it possible to eradicate multiple myeloma.
"This is all evolving at a fairly significant pace, but we now have an opportunity to think bigger,” said Dhodapkar, who noted that the newer approaches will need to be tested in clinical trials.
“It’s an honor to have this chair, which enables us to pursue collaboration with other faculty at Fred Hutch,” Dhodapkar said. “The opportunity to collaborate with folks at this institution is partly what attracted me to Fred Hutch. I am deeply grateful to the Rubin family for their support.”
Fred Hutch President and Director Thomas J. Lynch, Jr., MD, said Dhodapkar’s focus on multiple myeloma intersects with Fred Hutch’s extensive history treating such disorders. “Fred Hutch is a leader in treating hematological disease,” said Lynch, who holds the Raisbeck Endowed Chair. “Dr. Dhodapkar’s expertise is continuing that tradition with the breadth and depth of his research into immune-based approaches to treatment. We are incredibly fortunate to have recruited such a seasoned expert.”
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Mike Rubin was in college when he experienced spontaneous bruising. One of his father’s college roommates was a hematologist-oncologist in New York City. Lab tests led to a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, a group of pre-leukemic blood disorders.
Four years later, as expected, it progressed to acute myeloid leukemia. In anticipation that a bone marrow transplant would be needed, Rubin’s sister had already been identified as a transplant match. Within weeks of Rubin’s AML diagnosis, he landed in Seattle.
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“I came here because we were told at some point I would need a bone marrow transplant, and the best place to go is Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center,” he said. “I had never heard of this place, but I was told, ‘If you want the best, that’s where to go.’”
Rubin had his first consult at Fred Hutch on March 13, 1987 — Friday the 13th — and was transplanted on April 1.
“I was 24 and terrified,” he said. “I was told that the mortality rate was 50%. I asked my odds, and they said we’ve done nine transplants on people with your disease and eight are still alive. That was both terrifying and heartening — eight were still alive, but they had only done nine with my diagnosis.”
Since then, the number of transplants has grown considerably. Each year, Fred Hutch typically performs more than 100 transplants for adult leukemia.
For years after the transplant, Rubin was worried he would relapse. He experimented with numerous career paths ranging from freelance production work to nursing school — as a nursing student, he even got a summer job at Fred Hutch on the transplant ward — to law school. A chance meeting with a fundraiser from the Seattle Art Museum led to a fundraising job at Fred Hutch in 2000.
“I learned the business of fundraising from the bottom up,” he said. “When I went out on my first call to thank a donor, I found that this was a role that requires connecting with people and their stories, listening and hearing them. I was hooked.”
Mike Rubin worked with his father to translate his family’s appreciation for the care he received years earlier into a permanent source of funding for Fred Hutch. “When I think of Fred Hutch,” Milton Rubin said, “I think of research. Research is the lifeblood of cures. There’s nothing more important.”
Endowed chairs at Fred Hutch are a way for donors to financially champion the work of scientists and clinicians through sustained, flexible support for groundbreaking research. Donors can choose to endow a chair for a faculty member with a gift of $2 million or more.
These endowments are a cornerstone of the Campaign for Fred Hutch, which is bringing together the community to raise $3 billion to radically increase the pace and scale of innovation.
“Breakthroughs are possible in part thanks to our now 48 endowed chairs,” Lynch said. “As our most long-lasting and dependable source of private funds, they drive scientific discovery and advance our mission.”
Bonnie Rochman is a senior editor and writer at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. A former health and parenting writer for Time, she has written a popular science book about genetics, "The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids—and the Kids We Have." Reach her at brochman@fredhutch.org.
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