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Read more about Fred Hutch achievements and accolades.
As researchers in the laboratories and clinics of Fred Hutch Cancer Center strive to develop tomorrow’s cures for cancer, many are also pursuing innovative ways to improve the experience of people living with the disease today.
Three such researchers were honored recently with a Young Investigator Award from Conquer Cancer®, the ASCO Foundation, the philanthropic foundation of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO®): Fred Hutch and University of Washington hematology-oncology fellows Hannah Abrams, MD, and Gabrielle Paras, MD, as well as fellowship graduate and current Fred Hutch faculty member Blossom Suravi Raychaudhuri, MD. They will be recognized at the 2026 ASCO annual meeting, held in Chicago, May 29-June 2.
“These are competitive awards. For Fred Hutch to have three recipients this year is a testament to the research environment and opportunities here,” said Manoj Menon, MD, MPH, director of the hematology-oncology fellowship program.
This year’s awardees work on leukemia, sarcoma and prostate cancer studies, representing both the breadth and depth of research at Fred Hutch. Each receives a one-year, $50,000 grant. Recipients carry out their projects under the mentorship of an established principal investigator, obtaining pilot data that may lead to more funding opportunities in the future.
It’s about time: addressing the time costs of clinical trial participation
Advances in cancer treatment depend on people being willing to take part in clinical trials testing new therapies or new uses of existing therapies. Thankfully, many patients generously volunteer in hopes of benefitting themselves as well as others with their disease. To encourage enrollment and speed scientific discovery, researchers are wise to be mindful of the time studies require from participants and their caregivers, Abrams said.
“Time costs are an underappreciated part of the cancer experience and something that really matters for patients,” she said. “This topic is personal to me because when I was a child my mom underwent treatment for sarcoma while balancing work and parenting. One of my main memories of that period is spending a lot of time in waiting rooms.”
Abrams designed a project to better estimate how long it will take to participate in a clinical trial by studying the time costs of 245 trials from the SWOG Cancer Research Network. The research team will evaluate how time costs relate to patients’ willingness to join trials and stay enrolled. Interviewers will ask how patients thought about time costs when deciding whether to participate and how they’d like researchers to communicate time costs in the future.
No one has ever put together a data set on this topic as large as Abrams plans to compile. The findings, she hopes, will help Fred Hutch build a tool to describe time costs to patients in a more straightforward way and will help researchers everywhere streamline their studies.
“Some of the pilot data for this grant comes from a survey of Fred Hutch patients," Abrams said. "Even here, where our clinical trial coordinators do an amazing job of informing and preparing trial participants, going over the schedule line by line, 41% of respondents said the trial they were in took more time than they expected.”
Her mentor, Co-Director of Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research Veena Shankaran, MD, connected Abrams with the SWOG Patient Advocate Committee, whose input was instrumental in creating the grant proposal. Committee members made clear that patients often want to take part in trials even if they’re time intensive, but they value knowing the time commitment up front so they and their families can plan accordingly.
Shankaran’s mentorship “has allowed me to go from ideas and passion to building structured research plans, applying for grants and understanding how to do meaningful, patient-engaged health services research,” Abrams said, with the ultimate goal of improving access to the most effective care.
Abrams’s work has been supported in part by the Anderson Family Sarcoma Fellowship. She will join the sarcoma faculty at Fred Hutch in January.
Balancing survival with quality of life in metastatic prostate cancer
People with metastatic prostate cancer are living longer, thanks to new therapies, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their quality of life is getting better.
“To me, the best care means finding treatments that balance both efficacy against the disease and quality-of-life improvement,” Paras said.
Seeking this balance, she designed a research project to test Lutetium-177-PSMA-617 (LuPSMA), which delivers radiation directly to cancer cells, and intermittent high-dose testosterone, also called bipolar androgen therapy (BAT).
Testosterone, the main androgen (male hormone), can promote prostate cancer growth. When cancer has spread to distant parts of the body, men typically receive androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT), a type of hormone therapy that slows the disease by reducing testosterone levels or preventing testosterone from reaching cancer cells.
But ADT can cause side effects, and over time, the cancer develops resistance, morphing into what physicians call metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. To compensate for the resistance, patients need additional treatments along with ADT. Traditionally, this has meant chemotherapy. LuPSMA is an alternative to chemotherapy that can help control the disease with less severe side effects.
Previous studies have shown that BAT also helps fight prostate cancer, and it can offset the fatigue and sexual dysfunction caused by ADT. Paras’s hypothesis is that combination LuPSMA and BAT will improve both disease control and quality of life while patients continue on ADT, with BAT cancelling out some of ADT’s side effects, and BAT plus LuPSMA having greater anti-cancer effects than either has alone.
Researchers will look for objective signs that the treatment combination is working and ask patients about their experience via a questionnaire.
“I’m very grateful to have been selected for this award because I think prioritizing how treatments are affecting patients is something the medical field needs to do more of,” Paras said. “As we work on increasing patient survival, it’s also important to make sure care aligns with patients’ values and what they want to be getting out of treatment.”
Medical oncologist Michael Schweizer, MD, Fred Hutch’s genitourinary oncology clinical researcher director, and psychologist Salene M.W. Jones, PhD, an expert on patient-reported outcomes, have mentored Paras, who said she’s thankful for their guidance and support. When her fellowship ends later this year, she hopes to continue working at an academic medical center where she can use patient-reported outcomes in trials and in clinical care to better understand how patients are truly faring.
Bringing basic science and clinical research together to fight AML
Today, oncologists have few options to offer people with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) if their disease relapses after standard frontline therapy — usually intensive chemotherapy — or it doesn’t respond in the first place. The quest for new treatments is particularly urgent because many patients in this situation survive less than a year, and “sometimes only a few months, depending on how aggressive their disease is,” said Raychaudhuri, an assistant professor in Fred Hutch’s Clinical Research Division. “It’s a very vulnerable population.”
Raychaudhuri received the Young Investigator Award for a clinical trial testing the immune-targeting drug axatilimab along with CLAG-M, a combination chemotherapy commonly used for relapsed or refractory AML (R/R AML).
CLAG-M kills a range of fast-growing cells in the body. Axatilimab, on the other hand, targets immune cells called monocytes that have been shown to support leukemia cells in the bone marrow. It’s already used to treat graft-versus-host-disease by tamping down the rogue immune system of people who’ve had a blood or marrow transplant. Together, CLAG-M and axatilimab may have complementary mechanisms of action against AML without excess toxicity, Raychaudhuri explained.
“One part of the project is treating patients and seeing how they do. The second aim is looking at how the immune system responds to this treatment at a cellular level. A unique aspect of working at Fred Hutch is that clinical scientists and basic lab scientists can collaborate,” she said. “Clinical scholars have the opportunity to work with lab scientists to really find out the molecular and immunologic underpinnings of how a therapy works.”
Researchers will look at how patients’ immune cells change after treatment and whether the changes correlate with their disease response. The Phase 1 trial is being led by hematologist Jacob Applebaum, MD, PhD.
During her fellowship, Raychaudhuri worked on several clinical trials under the mentorship of Mary-Elizabeth Percival, MD, a hematologic oncologist who specializes in AML and myelodysplastic syndrome.
“I’m very grateful to Dr. Percival for supporting me in learning about the field of AML while at the same time encouraging independent exploration of my own ideas as I build my career,” said Raychaudhuri.
Rigorous science and deep compassion: an award-winning combination
Fred Hutch has been home to many winners of the annual ASCO Young Investigator Award over the years.
“It highlights our commitment to science as well as our faculty, who thoughtfully mentor and guide fellows through the whole process — from identifying a research question, to developing a potential protocol, to submitting their grant application,” Menon said.
While the $50,000 grant can provide salary support or fund research supplies, much of the value lies in the learning that happens before winners are even selected. To prepare applicants, Johnnie José Orozco, MD, PhD, assistant director of the hematology-oncology fellowship program, offers a grant-writing seminar in which trainees learn how to engage in a peer-reviewed grant opportunity. Simply completing the application fosters their development as scientists and helps set them up for successful research careers.
“The 2026 Young Investigator Award recipients are exceptional fellows in their own right, and their achievements reflect Fred Hutch’s commitment to nurturing talented scientists who aspire to build careers that unite rigorous research with deep compassion for the patients and families we serve,” said Senior Vice President and Director of Fred Hutch’s Clinical Research Division Sara Hurvitz, MD. Hurvitz holds the Smith Family Endowed Chair in Women’s Health.
