On Jan. 31, 2006, Dan Duncan, founder of Enterprise Partners, an energy company in Houston, announced a donation of $100-million to the Baylor College of Medicine for cancer research, patient care, and the creation of an endowed chair. The college hoped the gift would help obtain a federal designation as a cancer center.

The Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center, which will be based in the Texas Medical Center, will be organized around eight major programs: cell and gene therapy, cancer prevention and population sciences, molecular carcinogenesis, nuclear receptor biology, breast cancer, pediatric oncology, cancer biology, and prostate cancer.

According to its director, Dr. C. Kent Osborne, the new center will improve the college’s chances of becoming a “comprehensive cancer center,” a designation awarded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health that opens the doors for additional funding. Said Osborne, “While both the east and west coasts have a high concentration of these designated top-tier institutions, with some cities having several centers, there are only two NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers across the whole of the Gulf Coast and the Southwestern United States.”

The $100 million gift, one of the largest in Texas history, is in addition to the $35 million given by the Duncan family last year for the Baylor Clinic, the college’s new adult ambulatory care facility in the Texas Medical Center, and the $2 million it gave for prostate cancer research two years ago.

“The real beneficiaries…are the cancer patients who will recover and live longer because of the research and treatments that will be fast-tracked as a result of this unprecedented gift,” said Dr. Peter G. Traber, president and CEO of the Baylor College of Medicine.