Our Research

Marie Bleakley, M.D., PhD is a pediatric oncologist and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT) physician. She is an Associate Member in the Fred Hutch Clinical Research Division’s Program in Immunology and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM). She is Director of the Cellular Therapy and Transplantation for Pediatric Leukemia and the Gerdin Family Endowed Chair for Leukemia Research at Fred Hutch, and Co-Director of the Integrated High Risk Leukemia Clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her research laboratory is developing new therapies and transplantation strategies to separate the beneficial Graft-versus-Leukemia Effect (GVL) from potentially dangerous Graft-versus-Host-Disease (GVHD), in order to improve the outcomes of patients with high-risk leukemia.

Dr. Bleakley is the sponsor of successful Investigational New Drug applications to the FDA and Principal Investigator of one ongoing and two recently completed clinical trials evaluating depletion of naïve T cells from allogeneic peripheral blood stem cell grafts to prevent GVHD. The research group has also developed an adoptive T cell immunotherapy trial involving genetic modification of donor T cells using a lentiviral vector to express a T cell receptor specific for the minor histocompatibility antigen, HA-1.