On Oct. 29, 2008, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) announced that Nike founder Philip H. Knight and his wife, Penny, have made a seven-year, $100 million pledge to the newly renamed OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. The Knights’ gift is expected to help the institute achieve its goal of making Oregon’s cancer death rate the lowest in the nation.

The gift will establish a fund that can be used at the discretion of the institute’s director, Dr. Brian Druker, who assumed the post in 2007 with the goal of making Oregon the national leader in the prevention and treatment of cancer.

In a highly competitive market for top faculty, the gift is expected to help attract researchers from other top cancer centers while motivating its existing faculty to remain at OHSU.

Druker, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, said that by bringing the best and brightest minds together, equipping them with the best resources, and supporting their efforts to target the underlying causes of cancer, the resulting breakthroughs will benefit cancer patients everywhere.

The pledge also calls for the first $2 million of the gift to complete labs in the Center for Cancer Cell Signaling in OHSU’s new Biomedical Research Building, which will be named the Linda Conant Laboratory Suite. Conant, a close friend of the Knight family, died of breast cancer in January.