Vanessa Osorio Laughlin has noticed a perk of giving monthly to Fred Hutch Cancer Center — she gets thanked twelve times a year. Thirteen, if you count the acknowledgment letter at tax time.
“I don’t mind the gratitude,” she joked. “I don’t mind getting thanked.”
The gift itself has become a ritual of sorts to Osorio Laughlin over five years of giving, automatic but still rich with intent. When the payments are interrupted — by a changed credit card number, perhaps — she happily updates the information, an act she describes as a recommitment to something she has already chosen.
“It doesn’t lose its meaning because it’s small and regular,” she said. “It’s the sense of continuity, not the amount.”
That continuity also shapes the relationships at the center of Osorio Laughlin’s life. She has known her best friend since she was four, remains close to a large extended family and has lived in the same Seattle house for more than 20 years, raising two children with her husband, whom she’s known since high school.
But the people closest to her are not the only familiar presences in that history. Growing up on Whidbey Island, Osorio Laughlin heard “Fred Hutch” as part of the region’s vernacular long before the institution entered her life. Cancer was part of the background, too, appearing so often on both sides of her family that a genetic counselor reviewing her family history stopped to ask whether Osorio Laughlin had made a typo. She had not.
“I don’t know anybody cancer hasn’t touched,” Osorio Laughlin said. “If you love people, have relatives, this is going to be part of it.”
Her father-in-law, Jay Banister Laughlin, was diagnosed with bile duct cancer and participated in a clinical trial before his death in 2016. Six years later, her father, Ed Brewster, developed acute myeloid leukemia and was treated at Fred Hutch before he died in 2022. Their deaths fell within the same week in May.
Both men lived longer than their initial prognoses, and Osorio Laughlin’s gratitude for that time remains inseparable from her grief.
“I’m not like, ‘Oh, Fred Hutch, you didn’t cure them,’” she said. “I say, ‘Thank you for all the extra time you gave us.’”
With breast cancer present in her family history, Osorio Laughlin began screening early. But she was unprepared for what it would feel like to return to the same Fred Hutch building where her father had spent his final week of life. She recognized the lobby where her mother and family members had gathered to comfort each other as more relatives began to arrive from out of town. Now Osorio Laughlin was back, for the sake of her own health.
“You’re there with your mind toward prevention,” she said, “but then you’re seeing this augmented reality. You’re seeing the memory play out because it’s the same place. And that’s OK.”
Donors’ generosity enables progress across the programs and disease areas that matter most to them. For example, Fred Hutch scientists are developing immune therapies to help prevent acute myeloid leukemia from returning and identifying weaknesses in bile duct tumors that could be pathways to new treatments. Pancreatic cancer research is also making headway: The recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of a therapy called daraxonrasib, which Fred Hutch experts called “the beginning of a paradigm shift,” is sparking a wave of new developments. Among them is a planned clinical trial that will investigate whether daraxonasib, in combination with another drug, can target an especially aggressive form of pancreatic cancer.
Support from donors like Vanessa Osorio Laughlin makes discoveries like these possible and helps turn them into advances that reshape how cancer is treated nationwide and around the world, giving more families more time together.
Osorio Laughlin also gives her time as a member of Fred Hutch’s Professional Advisory Council, joining other professionals who advise on charitable giving and help people connect their financial and family priorities with opportunities to support research. Through the council, she hears from scientists about advances that could give other families more time together, while knowing what it means to lose someone before those advances arrive.
“You feel a lot of gratitude, and we’re making progress, and this is going to mean so much to other people,” she said. “But it can’t be fast enough.”
Osorio Laughlin knows she cannot revise her family’s past. But giving monthly is one way she can help accelerate progress. She is among about 700 monthly donors to Fred Hutch, many of whom have been giving for more than a decade. Together, their gifts provide a growing, reliable source of support as researchers build on discoveries and develop novel approaches to cancer prevention, detection and treatment. Through the Campaign for Fred Hutch, contributions of all sizes come together to help promising research reach patients sooner.
For Osorio Laughlin, giving each month is a way of keeping in touch with a familiar presence she’s come to know in deeply personal ways. Each thank-you is a welcome acknowledgement of a connection she continues to choose — with all the gratitude, grief and hope that come with it.
“My monthly gift is an easy way to do what actually is a complex and hard thing,” she said. “It’s an easy lift for something that, let’s be real, is one of the hard parts of being human and being in relationships and being in a family: caring about people and losing people.”
Make a monthly gift
Monthly giving is a simple, flexible way to provide steady support for research at Fred Hutch. Choose an amount and your gift will be processed automatically each month; you can update or cancel it at any time.
About our Heart of the Hutch series
Much of Fred Hutch’s lifesaving research is possible because of the generosity of its supporters, who continually use their creativity and resourcefulness to raise money for research to prevent and treat cancer and other diseases.
This series highlights just a few of the thousands of Fred Hutch supporters who are the Heart of the Hutch.
Nicole Na is a writer on the Philanthropy team at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. With a foundation in biology and experience in Fred Hutch labs, Nicole began her career in writing at conservation nonprofits before managing scientific publications at the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. These experiences ultimately led her to her current role, where she combines her passions for science and storytelling. Reach her at nna@fredhutch.org.
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