News

Seattle, WA – September 16, 2025

Washington Research Foundation (WRF) has awarded $1 million to Fred Hutch Cancer Center (Fred Hutch) to continue its support of the organizations’ collaboration to accelerate the development of technologies with significant potential to improve patient health. WRF has now provided a total of $3.5 million in grants to the collaboration, which was established in 2021.

The new $1 million award will provide between $50,000 and $250,000 each to additional projects over approximately the next 12 months.

“We are delighted to continue supporting translationally-focused projects at Fred Hutch through this program,” said Meher Antia, Ph.D., WRF’s director of grant programs. “Fred Hutch is home to talented and innovative researchers who are working on technologies that can make a real-world impact on patients, and we have already seen how our funding can help them achieve this goal. The current award will further strengthen the partnership between our organizations.”

WRF’s prior funding of the program has supported around 20 projects, including the advancement of novel diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics for conditions spanning fibrosis, Epstein-Barr virus, neurodegeneration, cancers and other serious health issues.

Sujatha Srinivasan, Ph.D., along with colleagues David Fredricks, M.D., and Dan Raftery, Ph.D., who hold joint appointments with Fred Hutch and the University of Washington, are developing a rapid point-of-care diagnostic for bacterial vaginosis (BV) with the assistance of two earlier awards from the program totaling $300,000. BV is a common reason for women to seek medical care for vaginal symptoms, and misdiagnosis can lead to inadequate treatment. BV is associated with increased risks for acquiring sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and reproductive health and childbirth complications.

They have identified and validated a set of small molecule biomarkers for sensitive and specific diagnosis of BV.

“We are incredibly grateful for the early support from WRF,” Srinivasan said. “Their funding was pivotal in allowing us to validate the biomarkers, a crucial first step in developing a point-of-care test for bacterial vaginosis. Moreover, the additional guidance we received from health economics and regulatory perspectives was invaluable. WRF has given us the support to translate a scientific idea into a meaningful diagnostic solution facilitating the move from the lab bench to clinical settings, and ultimately to women’s homes.”

Srinivasan, Fredricks and Raftery have co-founded a Fred Hutch spinoff company, MetaboliteDx, to help advance diagnostic solutions for infectious causes of vaginitis, including BV.

Kristin Lastwika, Ph.D., received a $100,000 grant from the program last year. In Fred Hutch’s Translational Science and Therapeutics Division, Lastwika is developing antibody drug conjugates as a novel treatment for small cell lung cancer (SCLC). Survival rates for SCLC, the sixth-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the U.S., have not significantly improved in recent decades. Lastwika hopes to change this by targeting citrullinated transferrin receptor, a protein found in patients with SCLC that has not been a substantial target for therapeutics until recently.

“The funding from WRF enabled us to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach: identifying and engineering new antibody-based therapeutics all from patient’s anti-tumor immune responses,” Lastwika said. “This has directly led to venture capital investment to form a new immunotherapeutics company where myself and fellow Fred Hutch researchers Drs. Paul Lampe and McGarry Houghton are scientific co-founders.”

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About Washington Research Foundation:

Washington Research Foundation (WRF) supports research and scholarship in Washington state, with a focus on life sciences and enabling technologies.

WRF was founded in 1981 to assist universities and other nonprofit research institutions in Washington with the commercialization and licensing of their technologies. WRF became one of the foremost technology transfer organizations in the nation, earning more than $445 million in licensing revenue for the University of Washington. To date, WRF has provided over $182 million in grants to the state’s research institutions.

WRF Capital, the investment vehicle for Washington Research Foundation, has backed 132 local startups since 1996. Returns support the Foundation’s grantmaking and investment programs.