Breakthrough for Research at OHSU
Published Feb 13, 2009
Oregon Health & Science University overlooks Portland from Marquam Hill.
The Oregon Health & Science University is worth a lot to Portland, and now it’s worth $100 million more.
As a testament to OHSU’s pioneering cancer research, Nike founder Philip H. Knight and his wife, Penny, pledged that amount to the OHSU Cancer Institute in October 2008 – the largest gift in the university’s history.
The academic medical center consists of health-care facilities and practices, professional schools, and research programs, with about 4,100 research projects currently under way.
Dan Dorsa, vice president for research, calls the Knight gift “transformational.” The first $2 million was put to immediate use to complete the Center for Cancer Cell Signaling, a $10 million facility where researchers are working to understand how cancer cells communicate. The remaining $98 million is in a current-use fund, available at the discretion of the center director, Dr. Brian Druker.
Dorsa says OHSU’s cancer research, recognized internationally, focuses on identifying problems in cell components and devising drugs and agents to treat those problems. “That has resulted not
only in scientific discovery and advancement, but has also led to the creation of some startup companies here in Oregon,” he says.
One of those is Portland-based MolecularMD, founded by Druker and colleagues to help identify the most effective cancer therapy.
OHSU stem-cell research is also notable. At the Oregon National Primate Research Center, scientists were the first to create primate embryonic stem cells from skin cells of rhesus macaque monkeys. Time magazine recognized the discovery, along with a human skin-cell advance, as the No. 1 scientific breakthrough of 2007.
Dorsa says OHSU balances its research between investigations with shorter-term application and more deliberate basic research “We have many scientists who are extremely important to us who conduct very fundamental research for which the application is not immediately obvious. But in five to 10 years, it may very well be.”
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Jeff Adkins
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