read-more
Read more about Fred Hutch achievements and accolades.
Fred Hutch Cancer Center’s Lynn Symonds, MD, who researches and treats breast cancer, received a prestigious American Society of Clinical Oncology Career Development Award for work on a new biomarker for triple-negative breast cancer, or TNBC.
Symonds completed her residency and fellowship at Fred Hutch and the University of Washington in 2022, mentoring under breast cancer oncologist and researcher Jennifer Specht, MD. She joined the Fred Hutch/UW faculty in 2023, and in early 2026 was named co-director of the Fred Hutch Breast Oncology Program beside Heather Parsons, MD, MPH, who holds the Maudslien Endowed Chair in Breast Cancer Precision Oncology Research.
The ASCO award, which includes $200,000 for three years from Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation, could not have come at a better time, Symonds said.
“This is very exciting for us,” she said. “We are so grateful to be moving this research forward so we can help patients. This award is also important because it supports early career investigators: it’s not just about supporting one project; it really helps nurture a career."
That project is a research collaboration with her mentor, Specht, who holds the Jill D. Bennett Endowed Professorship in Breast Cancer from UW Medicine.
“Jen Specht has been an incredible mentor since I was an intern in my residency program,” Symonds said. “I’ve been mentored by this program and the breast group for a very long time. I’m really a homegrown Fred Hutch person.”
From music to medicine
Like many Fred Hutch oncologists, Symonds is what’s known as a “clinician scholar.” She’s an assistant professor with both Fred Hutch and UW, seeing breast cancer patients two days a week and spending the rest of the time doing research. She also has a basic science background, unusual but incredibly useful for a breast cancer oncologist.
“I was interested in medicine, but then I went to work in a lab at Dana-Farber for two years doing basic science on the PI3K pathway which is commonly mutated in breast cancer,” she said. “And I really just developed a passion for the science.”
You will receive a monthly newsletter from us about our innovative research and compassionate care as well as updates on events and other helpful tools and tips.
You may unsubscribe at any time.
Symonds initially majored in classical voice, but when a cancer patient and the oncologist treating her did a presentation to her biology class on an exciting new drug, the die was cast.
“This was in the early 2000s, and the patient had been treated with Herceptin, which was new at the time,” she said. “I remember hearing her story and hearing her oncologist talk and it was so inspiring to me that there were new treatments coming out that were less toxic. It was such an interesting blend of science and helping people. After that, I just felt a really strong pull towards cancer biology and oncology.”
Symonds’ current project, HRDefine, very much aligns with that initial inspiration: creating less-toxic treatments to better serve patients.
Better defining who gets PARP
HRDefine is a collaboration between Specht, Symonds, Isabel Rodriguez, MD, and Elizabeth Swisher, MD, who first developed the novel biomarker at the University of Washington for ovarian/fallopian tube cancer. Swisher holds the Torkelson Family Endowed Chair.
HRD, short for homologous recombination deficiency or homologous repair deficiency, is a common mutation that drives cancers, including breast, ovarian, pancreatic and prostate. It’s found in up to half of triple-negative breast cancers, the most aggressive form of breast cancer.
Triple-negative breast cancers are negative for estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors and sufficient levels of the growth-promoting HER2 protein that are the targets of most breast cancer therapies, hence the name.
Symonds and her team are using data from previous studies to create a triple-negative breast cancer-specific assay capable of determining whether TNBC might respond to a targeted treatment known as a PARP inhibitor. Currently, only cancer patients with an inherited BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation receive this type of treatment, and only 5-10% of TNBC patients have it.
But they may have other mutations that might respond to PARP inhibition. HRDefine captures the broader range of DNA repair defects, potentially making many more TNBC patients eligible for PARP inhibitors as well as platinum chemotherapies.
“HRDefine uses a couple of different approaches to look at a broader group of genes in that pathway,” she said. “So rather than just looking at BRCA1 and BRCA2, it’s looking at a number of different genes.”
If approved for use in the clinic, HRDefine would differentiate which patients will benefit the most from these targeted treatments, precision oncology’s main promise.
For Symonds, it’s the sweet spot of science and medicine she was aiming for all those years ago.
“We really want to have a bench-to-bedside approach,” she said.
