Dr. Kate Markey named next Innovators Network Endowed Chair

Kate Markey, MBBS, PhD, FRACP, an assistant professor at Fred Hutch Cancer Center and UW Medicine, has recently been named the next holder of the Innovators Network Endowed Chair. Created by members of Fred Hutch’s Innovators Network, the endowed chair gives early-career scientists flexible funding to pursue high-risk, high-reward research with clear potential to benefit patients.

Markey is a bone marrow transplant physician and researcher whose work focuses on how bacteria in the gut can affect recovery after patients receive a bone marrow transplant or cellular immunotherapy. With support from the chair, she plans to deepen her research into ways of preventing or easing serious complications that can follow these treatments.

Unlike most endowed chairs at Fred Hutch, which carry the name of a family or individual, the Innovators Network Endowed Chair reflects the collective power of a community. On the network’s 10th anniversary in 2018, members came together to build this lasting source of support.

Every three years, the chair is awarded to a new early-career scientist whose work demonstrates creativity, collaboration, innovation and strong potential for patient impact, including through data science and emerging technologies.

From engineering to the clinic

Markey came to transplant research by an unlikely route. She trained as a chemical engineer in Australia and found her way to the lab almost by accident, during a study-abroad year at McGill University spent building models of stress on diseased blood vessels. Back home in Brisbane, she spent every spare hour in the lab, hooked on a bioengineering puzzle: coaxing stem cells into the blood cells patients need for transfusions. 

While exploring options for an MD/PhD program, she received a piece of advice from a mentor that turned out to be pivotal: If she liked stem cells, she should go talk to Geoff Hill, MD, FRACP.  

“That suggestion turns out to have shaped my entire career and life,” said Markey. 

She earned her PhD in Hill’s lab in Brisbane in 2010, trained as a postdoctoral fellow while completing her medical degree, then spent four years at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center before Fred Hutch recruited her to launch her own lab.

For Markey, the move felt like arriving somewhere she was meant to be. 

“Seattle is the academic home of transplantation,” she said. “The opportunity to start my lab here was an absolute dream come true — something I never would’ve imagined when I started in transplant research at 21.” And Hill, the mentor she’d been sent to talk to all those years ago, now holds the Leonard and Norma Klorfine Endowed Chair for Clinical Research — and runs the lab a floor below hers. 

Where the microbiome meets recovery

Today, Markey’s work bridges the microbiome and the immune system. She studies how the trillions of microorganisms living in and on the body influence how patients recover after bone marrow transplantation and cellular immunotherapy, blood cancer treatments that work in part by rebuilding the immune system.

One major focus of her research is chronic graft-vs.-host disease, or GVHD, a common and serious complication in which immune cells from a transplant donor attack the recipient’s healthy tissue. Markey’s lab recently identified a connection between damage to the intestinal microbiome and chronic GVHD, which can leave patients coping with debilitating symptoms for years.

That finding points to a promising possibility: If the loss of certain gut bacteria helps drive the disease, then restoring the microbiome could help prevent or reduce it. In time, that approach could lessen patients’ reliance on intensive immune-suppressing drugs.

Markey now plans to test treatment strategies in combination, including dietary changes, replacement of bacteria lost during treatment, and small molecules that block harmful microbial pathways while supporting protective ones when the microbiome cannot be fully restored.

“There are a lot of exploratory projects using samples I’ve been collecting that I can now dive into,” Markey said. “I’m so grateful to be awarded the chair — it will really give me some flexibility to make sure I can pursue some higher-risk, innovative projects and accelerate my program.”

Room to chase the next idea

That kind of exploratory work is often among the hardest to fund. Markey’s research begins with clinical observations and follows those questions into the lab, a process that can open important new lines of inquiry but does not always fit neatly into traditional grant structures.

“Grant funding is tight at the moment, and it’s tough to operate a lab in an environment where every dollar coming in the door is pre-committed to a funded project,” Markey said. “This gives me some freedom that I otherwise wouldn’t have.”

With that support, she can begin working through a backlog of studies built on patient samples she has been collecting, research she hopes will generate the next round of discoveries, hypotheses and grants.

"Backing early-career scientists like Dr. Markey helps retain the incredible young talent already here at Fred Hutch and gives them room to innovate and collaborate,” said Melanie Notari, an Innovators Network Council member. “The Innovators Network community is proud to support researchers who may face challenges securing funding — offering flexible, sustainable dollars to pursue their boldest ideas.”