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In 2021, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic challenged our daily lives but also sparked incredible scientific advancements as researchers worked to understand the evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus and develop ways to stop the disease. 

Throughout the year, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientists were at the forefront of COVID-19 research, publishing important results from COVID-19 vaccine trials and insights about the virus’s evolution and potential immune escape. Meanwhile, Hutch research on cancer and other diseases proceeded in office, lab and clinic — safely, thanks to on-campus vaccination clinics and other science-informed safety measures that allowed zero on-campus transmission of the COVID-19 virus.

Here is a look back at Fred Hutch research advances over the year, pulled from scientific journals and our scientists’ Twitter feeds. 

Photos by Robert Hood / Fred Hutch News Service

In 2020, Fred Hutch scientists were among the first to raise the alarm about the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s spread and stepped up to help lead the nation’s vaccine development enterprise. That scientific leadership continued in 2021. While viral variants spread and vaccines rolled out across the U.S. and much of the world, Fred Hutch scientists continued to make new discoveries that can not only help us respond to the COVID-19 virus as it evolves, but also other threats in the future. 

Over the course of the year, researchers in the nationwide COVID-19 Prevention Network, headquartered at Fred Hutch, published the results of their huge trial of the Moderna mRNA vaccine against the COVID-19 virus, demonstrating its safety and efficacy in more than 30,000 participants. Meanwhile, Fred Hutch scientists involved in the historic undertaking offered more insights from the trials: 

“There has been discourse stating that it is challenging and there are too many barriers to engaging with BIPOC communities,” Andrasik said. “We are hoping that this shows these are surmountable barriers, and it is possible to overcome them through long-term investments in relationships within the community and building reputations of trustworthiness as researchers and institutions.” 

Other Hutch researchers analyzed samples from vaccine trials to gain more insights about the vaccines’ effects. In March, a team led by Drs. Leo Stamatatos, Joel D. Meyers Endowed Chair holder Julie McElrath and Andrew McGuire found laboratory evidence that patients who have been infected with the COVID-19 virus and are subsequently vaccinated against it with an mRNA vaccine mount a stronger immune defense than those who were vaccinated but never infected with the virus. 

CoVPN researchers, including Dr. Michele Andrasik (pictured) discuss how the network worked with communities to achieve equitable inclusion and better health.

Another active area of COVID-19 research at the Hutch in 2021 was on mutations in the virus and the effect of these mutations on neutralization by antibodies, the targeted immune proteins elicited by infection and vaccination. This research aims, ultimately, at understanding how the virus could escape our immunity and thus informing the design of future vaccines and antibody treatments. (Read more about this research, including several of the studies described below, in the Fred Hutch News Service story: How studies of coronavirus immunity can inform better vaccines, treatments) 

Outside of these studies in his lab, Bloom was active in another area of coronavirus research: the question of where SARS-CoV-2 came from. In late spring 2021, the evolutionary biologist became one of the leading scientific voices calling for a more thorough investigation of SARS-CoV-2’s origins.  

“Greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” Bloom and coauthors wrote. 

Other Hutch scientists played a prominent role in raising concerns that summer about coronavirus evolution in immunosuppressed patients. Dr. Larry Corey, who co-leads the CoVPN’s vaccine testing pipeline, and computational biologist Dr. Trevor Bedford and colleagues called for heightened precautions in the treatment of people with weakened immune systems and better, more intensive therapies to help them recover from their disease in the wake of findings that virus variants are more likely to spring from such individuals.

Chronic infection in an immunocompromised person could, in fact, have been what led to the emergence of the omicron variant in late November, though scientists can’t yet know for sure. As 2021 closed, the highly mutated variant began to sweep the globe. And, once again, Fred Hutch scientists were on the case, tracking and modeling its spread, evaluating its ability to escape immunity, and advising officials on how to respond.  

As it becomes clear that SARS-CoV-2 will always be with us, Fred Hutch scientists at the Hutch’s COVID-19 Clinical Research Center are helping to develop new treatments for infection. In October, Hutch researcher Dr. Adrienne Shapiro was a lead author on the publication of interim results of a Phase 3 trial of the monoclonal antibody treatment sotrovimab, which found that compared to the placebo group, COVID-19 patients who received sotrovimab had a significantly reduced risk of hospitalization or death and that the outpatient IV treatment was safe. 

“As long as people are getting COVID-19, there is a need for effective treatment to prevent serious illness and death,” Shapiro said. 

For more highlights of Fred Hutch COVID-19 research in 2021, read the Hutch’s COVID-19 timeline featuring prominent media coverage and review this wrap-up of the latest Hutch research on COVID-19. 

Cancer did not slow down for the pandemic, and Hutch researchers published several key studies in 2021 they hope will lead to improved treatments for people with many forms of cancer. 

In June, Dr. Robert Bradley and collaborators published research demonstrating how RNA-altering drugs might improve cancer immunotherapy. Their work in petri dishes and mice shows that drugs that trigger errors in mRNA codes can cause tumor cells to sprout — sort of like adding eyes on a potato — lots of new and varied surface proteins called neoantigens. The body’s immune cells read these odd little protein displays as foreign, and they respond by attacking the tumor cells that carry them. 

“We normally think of mutations as a bad thing that are a cause for a tumor to start. But once a tumor is there, if it has a lot of mutations it can be a good thing, because it lets us use these new, transformative therapies,” said Bradley, who holds the McIlwain Family Endowed Chair in Data Science. 

The potential role of neoantigens in immunotherapy was also the focus of research published in July by Dr. Evan Newell and colleagues. These researchers are exploring why checkpoint inhibitors, drugs that “take the brakes” off immune responses, do not work in most patients. Using advanced techniques, they studied a failed response to such checkpoint inhibitors in mice with lung tumors. They found the mice generated plenty of killer T cells against a particular neoantigen, but the tumors did not shrink. Instead, the T cells showed traits of immune exhaustion, an unexplained weakening of their cell-killing functions. The work provides clues for further research on anticancer drugs and vaccines. 

In September, Dr. Taran Gujral and teammates demonstrated how machine learning, deep neural networks and other artificial intelligence tools can screen, identify and validate compounds, including some approved drugs, that could provide benefit to patients with advanced prostate cancer and other serious conditions. They identified two compounds that acted in a specific way against key molecules involved in prostate cancer growth and progression and suppressed prostate tumor growth in the lab. 

“Our goal was to determine if FDA-approved drugs available for clinical use might forestall drug development and deliver timelier solutions,” Gujral said. 

Fred Hutch’s leadership in COVID-19 research is built off the Hutch’s decades of expertise in infectious disease research, especially in HIV. Much of this HIV expertise lies in the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Headquartered at the Hutch, the HVTN is the world’s largest publicly funded, multi-disciplinary international collaboration facilitating the development of vaccines to prevent HIV/AIDS. In 2021, HVTN researchers published the results of large clinical trials of HIV prevention strategies: 

Drs. Trevor Bedford and Allison Black were among the co-authors of a report over the summer about the case of a man in the Democratic Republic of Congo who died from a relapse of Ebola virus disease. The 25-year-old contracted Ebola in June 2019, even though he had been vaccinated during a local outbreak six months earlier. He was treated with monoclonal antibodies and appeared to be cured, but in late November 2019 he had a fatal recurrence. The scientists tracked the infection by tracing small mutations in the viral genome — the same technology they use to track the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. The study confirmed that the man’s second bout was a relapse of his prior illness, six months earlier, and concluded that the recurrence set off a chain of transmission that subsequently infected 91 people. The case revealed a rare failure of an effective vaccine and demonstrated such cases can lead to onward transmission.   

The Fred Hutch News Service team works to cover the scientific advances by our researchers and translate them for a general audience. Here are the numbers behind our efforts in 2021:

Thank you for being part of the Hutch mission and supporting Fred Hutch science in 2021. Check out our look ahead to next year with Fred Hutch scientists' predictions and hopes for the advancements that 2022 will bring. 

And enjoy a few more of our favorite photos from the year:

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