Dr. Thomas Lynch Jr.’s path to cancer care began early, shaped by both his personal experiences and his father’s work. Growing up in Hackensack, New Jersey, he was no stranger to cancer. His father, Dr. Thomas Lynch Sr., was a pioneer in hematology and oncology, treating patients in his home office.

“I like to say I entered the family business in a way,” says Lynch Jr., who has served as president and director of Fred Hutch Cancer Center since February 2020, assuming the role at the outset of the pandemic. “I would see the impact that cancer made on people’s lives. The importance of that work was made very clear to me.”

Lynch’s career includes prominent roles such as chief scientific officer at global biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb, leadership positions at Massachusetts General Physicians Organization and Yale Cancer Center, and a professorship at Harvard Medical School. He was part of the first research team to discover how targeted therapies could change outcomes for lung cancer patients.

Since taking the helm at Fred Hutch in February 2020, Lynch has led the center through significant growth, including its merger with the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Last fall, Fred Hutch also spearheaded the Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA), a groundbreaking partnership with top cancer centers to harness artificial intelligence for cancer research. The more than $40 million in funding from tech and consulting giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Deloitte and Slalom is paving the way for transformative changes in cancer care.

In his own words:

My father was a big baseball fan, and he said Fred Hutch was the manager of the (Cincinnati) Reds, and they named the cancer center after him in Seattle. He said they were doing things that nobody else was.

People would go to Fred Hutch from all over the country as the only place that was doing bone marrow transplants. That’s why it was such an important institution. I remember hearing him telling me that when I was a teenager.

This (job) was the perfect combination of things. It represented the natural progression of my career with my combination of business and drug development experience plus the scientific experience of having run a cancer center. All those things are so important to the mission of Fred Hutch.

I’d never been out here before. I brought my wife once to look at it. What we didn’t realize is that Seattle was hilly. We never knew. It’s been great for biking and keeping yourself in shape, but that was the big surprise.

AI is completely changing the face of medicine. I say in three ways it’s going to change it. The first is administrative. Just like in every business in Seattle, AI is going to make the transaction part of our days much easier: to schedule appointments, to check your lab results, process bills, deal with insurance companies.

The second thing is in research, which is what CAIA is all about. This will allow us to gain insights into cancer cells and tumors and how they progress in patients. The impact on basic science, clinical science and drug development enabled by AI is going to be extraordinary. You can’t overemphasize it. It’s going to transform our world in a way that we could never have imagined. The third way is clinical medicine.

I use AI all the time. Now, when I’m talking about patients or talking about a disease, I will go to ChatGPT or other AI sources and I will inquire about the most recent literature on the treatment of a certain cancer. It’s going to change what a doctor needs to do.

A big discovery (recently) was on a new treatment for rectal cancer. I was able to get the entire work summarized and put in perspective in milliseconds.

(AI) will have a huge impact on visits and how doctors work in their daily life. A computer will generate the notes and documentation and provide decision support. In research, it will provide unbelievable amounts of data that even the best scientists can’t wade through. AI will enable us to unlock the secrets that are in that data, and it’s going to lead to new drugs in 10 years, drugs that we can’t even imagine today.

You’ve got to have cancer centers working together. We brought together four of the best cancer centers in the world to share our data using an AI algorithm. Our hope is to make that available to every cancer center in the country. You could use the collective wisdom of every patient treated across the country someday to be able to make those kinds of connections and observations.

The reason (CAIA) was so critical is that if I want to share data with Sloan Kettering, we have to negotiate a data sharing agreement between the two hospitals. That’s two years of lawyers going back and forth on data sharing. It just takes forever to get that done. ChatGPT is going to enable sharing on a time scale that we need to make differences.

Medical schools aren’t going away. Doctors still have to be trained and know what makes sense. AI is not going to completely replace the physician.

Two things. One is (that) the ability of ChatGPT and Copilot in July 2025 is way better than it was in July 2023. The difference in two years is mind-boggling. It’s much more accurate. It still makes mistakes, though. You want to make sure you have confidence in the answers as you go forward, and that’s something we have to be very, very careful about.

The other thing about AI is the ethics and the fact that datasets that AI is based on aren’t always the same that doctors would have used.

We also have to make sure that it represents our whole population. How many native Alaskans are in databases that AI is going to access? At Hutch, we really are working on those areas that are underserved — the rural parts of Washington state, the rural parts of Alaska and Idaho. We want to enhance our connection to those communities.

We’d love to see (in CAIA) if we can ask a question and get an answer: that it’s technically possible to do federated learning from these datasets from these four places. We’re pretty sure we’ll be able to do that.

The real promise is when the questions get better and the answers get more important. We’re still working on the technology of how to actually do this. The progress will be exponential after that. We’re going to get a lot better.

But it also puts a real premium on gathering data effectively and making sure that we’re profiling patients and that we’re doing full comprehensive molecular profiling and genomic sequencing.

I think the one thing that I’ve always been impressed with in Seattle is the can-do attitude of the place. It’s not a surprise that Hutch is one of the most innovative cancer centers in the world.

It’s also not a surprise that Amazon, Microsoft, Costco, Starbucks, Expedia, T-Mobile all got their starts here. That’s not random, and it says a lot about the culture of the city, the town, the region.

I do want people to know that in medicine, collaboration is way more common than you might think.

There are people who came out with a collaborative study that showed you could cure rectal cancer with just a drug — with no need for surgery, no need for radiation. My God, it’s something I could never have imagined when I started off: that a simple drug would cure rectal cancer. This is a massive breakthrough in terms of what we can do. That’s curing cancer everywhere.

In the Northwest, the places we’ve made a huge difference are in diseases like myeloma and leukemia, lymphoma. And it’s not just the Hutch, it’s the whole ecosystem of the Northwest. We’re at a time now of amazingly fast discoveries, as long as we don’t stop federal funding for research. That’s my biggest concern.

It’s been a remarkably strong partnership between the federal government and science in the U.S. that’s led to all of these breakthroughs. And gosh, it would be a disaster if we did anything that interrupted that.

I think you’re going to find that specific cancers will be cured. I still think it’s going to take a while to cure all the different cancers, because cancer’s not one disease, it’s thousands. In the next 10 years, we’re going to cure some of them, and some of them 10 years after that.

Fred Hutch has done incredible things in infectious disease, and we continue to work in that area. Even when cancer’s cured, and it might be 20 years, it might be 50 years, it might be 100 years, we will still have infectious diseases to worry about.

When we created a new structure in 2022 we had to meet with the lawyers. And the lawyers said, “What if your mission is no longer valid?” And I can’t tell you the smile that brought to my face. And these were dry lawyers who didn’t even realize what they were asking.

As to the next 50 years, the great news is we’ve solidified our campus here in downtown Seattle. That will enable us to grow.

We want to bring the best scientists in the world to Seattle. I started my morning talking with my senior leaders about which top scientists we want to recruit this year. We won’t get every one of them, but we’ll get a lot of them because people want to be at Fred Hutch to do science. We’re growing our profile in the curative approach to cancer. And that’s what the next 50 years is all about.

I just think it’s really important to thank the people of Seattle who’ve been so extraordinarily supportive of the Hutch over the years from a philanthropy standpoint. You can’t do this just based on federal funding.

It’s got to also involve people stepping forward and riding an OBL (Obliteride, a bike ride that raises money for cancer research). Or you’ve got a colleague at the Boeing plant who’s got leukemia, and you do something to help out.

The people of Seattle have made such a big difference in supporting us. I feel so supported by a community here that really values the Hutch as a treasured part of what makes Seattle great.