Rate My Professor Marie Bleakley

Marie Bleakley, MD, PhD, MMSc, is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist in Medicine at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. She is Professor in the Translational Science and Therapeutics Division, Director of Cellular Therapy and Transplantation for Pediatric Leukemia, and holds the Gerdin Family Endowed Chair for Leukemia Research. She is also Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, attending physician at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and co-director of the High-Risk Leukemia and Lymphoma Program there.

Dr. Bleakley received her MD (Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery) from Flinders University of South Australia in 1994. She completed pediatrics residency at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead from 1996 to 1999, followed by pediatric oncology fellowship there from 1999 to 2001. She earned an MMSc in Clinical Epidemiology from The University of Newcastle in 2000 and a PhD from The University of Sydney in 2010. Her pediatric hematology-oncology fellowship was at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s Hospital from 2002 to 2005. She has been on staff at Seattle Children’s since November 2005 and advanced through positions at Fred Hutch to full professor.

Her research centers on hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and T cell immunotherapy for high-risk pediatric leukemias and blood cancers. The Bleakley lab develops methods to enhance graft-versus-leukemia effects while minimizing graft-versus-host disease, including naive T cell depletion from donor grafts and T cells engineered with receptors targeting minor histocompatibility antigens such as HA-1. She is principal investigator on FDA-approved clinical trials for naive T cell-depleted peripheral blood stem cell grafts to prevent chronic GVHD and HA-1-specific adoptive T cell therapy for post-transplant leukemia relapse.

Key publications include 'Naive T-Cell Depletion to Prevent Chronic Graft-Versus-Host Disease' (Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2022), 'Outcomes of acute leukemia patients transplanted with naive T cell-depleted stem cell grafts' (Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2015), 'Development of T-cell immunotherapy for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation recipients at risk of leukemia relapse' (Blood, 2018), and 'Leukemia-associated minor histocompatibility antigen discovery using T-cell clones isolated by in vitro stimulation of naive CD8+ T cells' (Blood, 2010).

Honors include the Gerdin Family Endowed Chair for Leukemia Research, Stand Up To Cancer - American Association for Cancer Research Innovative Research Grant in Immuno-Oncology (2017), and Damon Runyon-Richard Lumsden Foundation Clinical Investigator award.