2013 Leaders in Health Care, Medical Research

WINNER:

Dr. Rainer Storb, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center/Seattle Cancer Care Alliance
Rainer Storbs research at SCCA has helped change how bone marrow stem cell transplants are done. The techniques he pioneered offer an alternative to treatments requiring severe radiation and chemotherapy. Instead, they rely on the immune cells of the donor graft to do the job of killing the tumor.

These methods have quickly gained widespread acceptance and have helped many patients who would otherwise have been ineligible for transplants due to age or complicating conditions. Success rates are high, with half of patients seeing remission in six months.

Since that milestone work, Storb continues to develop better methods, including a combination of readily available immunosuppressant agents to control adverse reactions, conditioning programs for transplantation and graft-rejection research that has improved patient survival rates.

Now in his 70s, Storb shows no signs of slowing down. He happily reports on his current work, seeking disease-specific molecular agents to delay tumor regrowth and further assist donor cells to eliminate tumors. Of current five-year patient survival rates, he says, Further work needs to be done to improve those odds, and he sounds confident of being the one to do it.

A native of Germany, Storb has made Seattle his home for nearly 50 years, ever since a Fulbright scholarship allowed him to work in the hematology division at the University of Washington. He still commutes to his office every day by sculling across Lake Union.

For all of his research accomplishments, Storbs greatest delight is his yearly rotation in clinical service, when he can meet the patients his work has helped, which pushes him to continue. When I see all the problems and issues we are facing, its a very big motivator, he says. I want to help as many patients as we can.

SILVER AWARDS:

William Catterall, M.D, UW Medicine
William Catteralls work to understand how cells signal electrically is not glamorous, but it is as essential as a beating heart. The chair of the Department of Pharmacology at UW Medicine has made several landmark discoveries that explain how cells generate and transmit impulses and signals that permit brain and muscle functioning. Many diseases, such as epilepsy, stem from disruption of those signals, and Catteralls foundational work has been used to develop better anti-seizure and anti-arrhythmia drugs.

Paul ODonnell, M.D., Seattle Cancer Care Alliance
As the medical director for the Adult Stem Cell Transplant Service at SCCA, ODonnell has helped pioneer the promising field of bone-marrow transplantation by finding ways to make it more readily available to the people who need the procedure. While traditional bone-marrow transplants have relied on careful donor matches, often from relatives, ODonnells stem-cell-based research in unmatched (haploid) donor transplants has improved the science. As a result of his work, nearly anyone can receive a needed bone-marrow transplant without the restriction of a matched donor.