Providence Research Center Enables Cross-Industry Collaboration

Got story updates? Submit your updates here. ›

The Paul G. Allen Research Center at Providence Swedish Cancer Institute features a distinctive structure and approach aimed at facilitating rapid, high-quality specimen and data collection to fuel cross-industry research collaborations. The center's director, Doug Kieper, explains how its co-located wet and dry lab teams, investigator-agnostic model, and streamlined specimen handling pipeline enable innovative studies that would be difficult to execute at traditional research centers.

Why it matters

The center's unique design and operations are intended to address longstanding challenges in the research ecosystem, such as the difficulty of obtaining high-quality biospecimens and data that can be readily utilized across different research platforms and disciplines. By lowering traditional barriers between healthcare providers, academia, and industry, the center aims to accelerate the pace of translational research and the development of new therapies.

The details

The Paul G. Allen Research Center is strategically located across the street from Providence Swedish's clinical spaces, allowing wet lab teams to receive specimens from the operating room within 30 minutes. This rapid specimen handling pipeline is critical for preserving the integrity of samples for advanced analytical techniques like spatial biology and multiplexing. The center also co-locates its wet and dry lab teams, as well as clinical and bioinformatics experts, in the same physical space to streamline data analysis and interpretation. Unlike traditional research centers organized around specific disease areas or individual investigators, the Paul G. Allen Center operates on an 'investigator-agnostic' model, reviewing proposed projects based on scientific merit and translational potential rather than institutional affiliations.

• The Paul G. Allen Research Center opened in 2025 with a $20 million bequest from the late Microsoft co-founder.
• During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the center was able to quickly characterize the differences between fludarabine and bendamustine as conditioning regimens for CAR-T therapy.

What they’re saying

What’s next

The center's findings on the use of bendamustine as a conditioning regimen for CAR-T therapy will need to be reviewed by industry sponsors to determine if they are willing to shift from the standard fludarabine regimen.