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| The Knight Cancer Challenge has almost been met! |
A year ago, this past September 20th, Nike founder Phil Knight, and his wife Penny, launched one of the most-impressive and inspiring cancer research challenges to date:
If OHSU can raise $500 million by February, 2016 the Knight family will match that $500 million -- all benefiting cancer research.OHSU & The Knight Cancer Institute
For those of you outside the Portland area, Oregon Health Science University (OHSU) is a nationally prominent research university, and Oregon's only public academic health center.
Over the years, OHSU has grown into a world class teaching hospital and research center.
The Knights and OHSU have history together in the cancer research community. In 2008, a $100 million donation from the Knights turned the then-named OHSU Cancer Institute into the Knight Cancer Institute. The NCI-designated institute is an international leader in cancer research and personalized cancer treatment.
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| OHSU sits above Portland's West Hills. |
Together, their mission is to 'end cancer as we know it.'
The Knight Cancer Institute focuses on attacking cancer on a molecular level, and looks for ways to detect cancers earlier, before they become deadly, giving more patients the chance to survive more cancers.
If OHSU is able to match the Knights' $500 million challenge, the vision for those funds will go towards:
- Seeking faster, smarter ways to detect and treat cancer – before it becomes deadly.
- Putting unprecedented research resources behind this initiative so that it can make a significant impact in a decade. We can’t ask those living with cancer to be patient.
- Assembling a collaborative, multidisciplinary team of cancer researchers, combining new recruits with top talent at OHSU to focus on improving early cancer detection, and fund their programs sufficiently to ensure they can devote their time to innovation.
- Investing in the resources to accelerate discovery. Investments in equipment, shared research resources and computational biology will generate new discoveries.
As of January 5th 2015, OHSU has received nearly $450 million towards the challenge. One anonymous donor, pledged $100 million to the effort in July of 2014.
Pretty impressive to raise those kinds of funds in less than a year. Nothing is guaranteed, but it seems that the Knight Cancer Challenge will be met (it feels crazy to assume $50 MILLION is a guarantee in a relatively short time frame), and $1 billion will be on its way to OHSU and cancer research.
If you'd like to participate in the challenge, go here for more information.
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