Dr. Shailender Bhatia receives the Lyn and Daniel Lerner Endowed Chair in Merkel Cell Carcinoma

In 1995 at the age of 29, Julie Lerner received a life-changing bone marrow transplant at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. 

Her parents, Lyn and Daniel Lerner, always remembered the gift that Fred Hutch had given their daughter. They intended to donate a part of their estate in recognition of the expert care that saved her life, but left the specifics up to Julie Lerner and her siblings, Paul D. Lerner and Ann Poole.

After Daniel Lerner’s death in 2024, the Lerner siblings decided to endow a chair to permanently fuel progress in Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC), the rare and aggressive skin cancer their father was treated for during the last decade of his life.

Medical oncologist Shailender Bhatia, MD, the inaugural holder of the Lyn and Daniel Lerner Endowed Chair in Merkel Cell Carcinoma, has dedicated his career to providing outstanding clinical care to patients with MCC and has led numerous clinical trials to improve outcomes in this life-threatening cancer. 

He collaborates closely with one of the only research teams in the world that focuses on MCC, and which has, within the last decade, transformed how advanced MCC is treated. Bhatia, director of the Melanoma and Renal Cancer Team at Fred Hutch and professor at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine, will receive flexible funding as he continues his pursuit of better immunotherapies for MCC to help more patients like Daniel Lerner.

Second transplant for a second chance at life

When Julie Lerner was 29, she was almost out of options. Her first bone marrow transplant at another cancer center had failed to cure her non-Hodgkin lymphoma and left her requiring frequent blood and platelet transfusions. She needed another transplant but was given a 15% chance of survival. After researching other cancer centers, she uprooted her life in New York and came to Fred Hutch in Seattle.

“Moving all the way across the country was daunting. And Fred Hutch had to take a chance on someone with not great odds, when many other hospitals might not have,” Julie Lerner said. “But now, here I am 30 years later.”

A difficult diagnosis

In 2014 — nearly 20 years after his daughter’s second transplant — Daniel Lerner was diagnosed with MCC on his leg at age 82. There are only about 3,000 new cases of MCC each year, but that number is on the rise as the population ages. Most diagnoses happen later in a person’s life.

Because of his daughter’s experience, Daniel Lerner flew in from Philadelphia to get a second opinion from Paul Nghiem, MD, PhD, professor and director of the Skin Oncology Clinical Program at Fred Hutch, and professor and holder of the George F. Odland Endowed Chair in Dermatology at UW Medicine. Nghiem, a world-renowned expert in MCC, advised about the latest treatment options Daniel Lerner could receive closer to home. 

The cancer returned multiple times, as it does for 40% of patients with MCC. A leg amputation gave Daniel Lerner several good years, and he died at age 91 in 2024.

At the epicenter of immunotherapy

While immunotherapy was already improving survival for some cancers when Bhatia joined Fred Hutch in 2005, the only approved treatments available for MCC were surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Advanced MCC did not typically respond to treatment for more than a few months.

Bhatia had been leading immunotherapy trials in melanoma, building on decades of groundbreaking research at Fred Hutch going back to the Nobel Prize–winning work in bone marrow transplantation by E. Donnall Thomas, MD. Bhatia wondered if immunotherapy would also work against MCC because of similarities between the two skin cancers, so he reached out to Nghiem to explore ideas for clinical trials.

Early on, it was hard to get access to drugs and funding because MCC is so rare, but Bhatia was persistent. He developed the first two immunotherapy trials for MCC in the world, which provided the initial proof-of-concept for the power of the immune system in eradicating even advanced MCC. Then, when new immunotherapies were approved for melanoma, the Fred Hutch and UW team led multisite trials that resulted in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approvals, in 2017 and 2018, for their use in MCC patients.  These approvals changed national guidelines and made immunotherapies the first-line treatment for patients with advanced MCC.

“Many of the patients from these trials, perhaps more than half, are still cancer free more than a decade later, despite presenting with stage 4 disease,” Bhatia said. “Before immunotherapy, nothing worked for more than a year or two.”

A Lerner family tradition

Daniel Lerner’s family hosted a celebration of his life after his death, drawing friends and family from across the country. Through his long career on the business side of television and radio in Philadelphia, and his deep involvement in multiple communities and causes, he had made a lot of friends. 

“So many people came up to me and said how much he helped them in one way or another,” Julie Lerner said. “It wasn’t sad, it was truly a celebration of all the wonderful things he had done.”

Daniel Lerner and his wife, Lyn, who predeceased him in 2022, were big believers in giving back through both philanthropy and volunteer work, a tradition that had been passed down from the previous generation. The gift the couple entrusted their children to make was the culmination of a lifetime spent supporting a range of organizations.

Fueling a lasting legacy

The endowed chair the Lerner siblings created is one of 25 that will ultimately be funded through the Anniversary Challenge. Fred Hutch currently has 50 total endowed chairs across the institution, which provide sustained, flexible support for faculty through a gift of $2 million. They are also a cornerstone of the Campaign for Fred Hutch, a $3 billion fundraising effort to radically accelerate the pace and scale of research.

“Endowed chairs are an increasingly important resource at Fred Hutch, giving scientists the freedom to pursue novel ideas that might not otherwise get funded,” said Fred Hutch President and Director Thomas J. Lynch Jr., MD, holder of the Raisbeck Endowed Chair. “The Lerner family’s generosity will be a perpetual force for innovation as we create the future of cancer research and care.”

Bhatia is planning to use the funding from his endowed chair for early studies of new ideas, laying the groundwork for larger grant- or industry-supported clinical trials that could lead to further treatment options. He is also planning to intensify his efforts to recruit and mentor early-career MCC researchers.

“We have to think about how to sustain our research in an ongoing way and how to expand it,” Bhatia said. “And for that, we need as many hands on the deck as possible. Training the next generation of Merkel cell immunotherapists — that is a big passion of mine.”

Bhatia’s current research projects are focused on using immunotherapy earlier in a patient’s treatment plan to reduce the high rate of recurrence that makes MCC so difficult to treat and on finding creative approaches for the 50% of patients with metastatic disease who don’t respond to current immunotherapies.

That is especially meaningful to the Lerner family, who hope that Bhatia’s research can help more families like theirs. 

“My father felt really grateful to Fred Hutch for saving Julie’s life,” said Paul D. Lerner. “And he wanted to give that gift to other people. We saw that Merkel cell is a tenacious type of cancer that will keep coming back, so anything that reduces recurrence is a huge step forward.”