This week, painters began adding Fred Hutch’s logo and lettering to the iconic smokestacks on the historic Seattle City Light Lake Union Steam Plant. Last year, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center signed a 10-year lease agreement to take ownership of the Steam Plant this June, with occupancy slated for the spring of 2020. Installation of the new signage is expected to be completed within the next several weeks.
The lease of the landmark structure will enable the Hutch, which has added more than 35 faculty researchers over the past year, to expand into 100,000 square feet of laboratory and office space. Portions of the building’s interior will be renovated to create an open-concept environment designed to accelerate highly collaborative science, particularly among teams focused on immunotherapy, data science and computational biology.
The convergence of biology, data science and technology helps researchers who study cancer and related diseases to pull important insights from the terabytes of data that can be generated from a single patient, analyze the inner workings of individual cells in new detail and explore how to better predict prognosis and tailor therapy. Expanding into the Steam Plant will give Fred Hutch researchers in these complementary disciplines the chance to work side by side to drive fundamental discoveries and develop new experimental treatments for patients.
The expansion also gives the wider community new opportunities to get involved in powering Hutch discoveries by funding the scientists, equipment and infrastructure, and projects at the intersection of innovation in data, tech and life sciences. To learn more, contact Fred Hutch’s Philanthropy team.
