On August 14, 2025, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) announced that Phil Knight, a cofounder of Nike, and his wife, Penny, donated $2 billion to the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. The record-setting gift is the largest single donation ever made to a U.S. university, college, or academic health center, according to the university, with the goal of transforming cancer care.
This most recent gift from the Knights comes over a decade after the couple pledged $500 million to OHSU providing the university could match the funding within 2 years, which it did. With the new infusion of funding, the cancer institute will undergo an organizational restructuring to turn it into a self-governing entity within OHSU called the Knight Cancer Group, which will have its own board of directors and manage OHSU’s cancer services. The new center will be headed by Brian J. Druker, MD, the JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research and Professor of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Medical Oncology at the School of Medicine at OHSU Knight Cancer Institute in Portland. According to Dr. Druker, becoming self-governing will allow the Knight Cancer Institute to cut through the usual bureaucracy to provide comprehensive care more seamlessly to patients.
Brian J. Druker, MD
“This new organization allows us to align the responsibility of effectively managing the investment from the Knights with the authority to transform cancer care for patients without getting too bogged down in bureaucracy, similar to the way Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Huntsman Cancer Institute operate,” said Dr. Druker. “And, if our model of care helps the rest of OHSU and other cancer institutions manage their patient services more efficiently, that’s a positive outcome, too.”
Accelerating Progress in CML
In the early 1990s, Dr. Druker was investigating the BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase as a target for therapeutic intervention for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a cancer that had a 5-year survival rate at the time of only 30%. His research led to the discovery of a compound called STI571, which could kill CML cells in vitro while preserving healthy cells. In 1998, Dr. Druker began conducting the first human clinical study of STI571, the early chemical name for imatinib mesylate.
In March 2001, imatinib was granted a U.S. Food and Drug Administration expedited review and approved 2 months later. Today, the 5-year survival rate for patients with CML treated with imatinib is close to 90%, and the estimated 10-year overall survival rate is over 83%, with survivors experiencing a life expectancy nearly comparable to that of the general population.1
In addition to Dr. Druker’s new position as President of the Knight Cancer Group, he is continuing his research in another rare blood cancer, acute myeloid leukemia (AML), in the multicenter Beat AML clinical trial investigating multiple novel agents. One of these agents is the selective menin inhibitor revumenib in combination with venetoclax and azacitidine, under study in newly diagnosed patients with AML (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT03013998).
Dr. Druker spoke with The ASCO Post about his vision to create a fully integrated cancer care model in which all patients with cancer receive not only the most effective treatment and access to clinical trials, but necessary supportive care to improve their quality of life as well (including psychological, genetic, and financial counseling; symptom management; and long-term survivorship care).
Making Patient Navigation Services a Priority
Please talk about how the $2 billion gift to OHSU from Phil and Penny Knight will help build a new cancer care model that provides access to clinical trials and a seamless experience for newly diagnosed patients with cancer.
We want to be able to offer our patients the most innovative treatments currently available, including access to clinical trials informed by our researchers as well as those initiated by industry and outside collaborators. Anyone who has worked with me knows that if we don’t have a treatment to offer patients at our center, we make sure patients know that, and then we provide them with referrals to a center that can offer the treatment they need.
In terms of how we plan to provide a more integrated care system and seamless experience for patients, I’m thinking of the time when a patient gets that dreaded call from a physician announcing “You have cancer.” When that happens, patients’ minds go numb, and they are left with having to navigate a complicated labyrinth of care, including coordination among different specialists to get them the care they need to manage their cancer. But even as patients transition to survivorship, they are often still dealing with symptoms and side effects of their cancer or its treatment, and we need to ensure that our care continues into this phase.
We want to make sure that patients’ needs are coordinated through the use of a patient navigation system to ensure that every patient receives personalized assistance throughout the cancer experience. We want to make patients’ experiences as simple as possible. I know that ASCO has promoted patient navigation as a priority. We want to make that priority a reality for patients.
Providing Comprehensive Care Throughout Survivorship
In addition to patient navigation services, funding from this gift will be used to improve patients’ quality of life from cancer diagnosis to survivorship through increasing access to psychosocial, genetic, financial, nutritional, and fertility counseling; symptom management; and long-term survivorship care. Will these services be at no cost to patients?
We want to make sure that all these services are made available to all patients with cancer. We’ve stated that desire very clearly. In fact, we even have as one of our maxims that “Cancer doesn’t discriminate; neither will we.”
Some of these services will be billable to insurance companies, and we will work with our patients and their insurance carriers to provide coverage for as many of these services as possible. We are also working with organizations to expand insurance coverage for these quality-of-life services, because we know they are critical to patients’ well-being and survival.
Improving Supportive Care for Patients
How do you envision the care provided by the Knight Cancer Group will impact outcomes for patients?
What’s really interesting about that question is I remember presenting at an award lecture during the ASCO Annual Meeting many years ago. One of the speakers talked about having a nurse navigator system in place in which nurses regularly reached out to patients undergoing chemotherapy to identify symptoms from the treatment that might prompt an emergency room visit and then circumvent that possibility through more specific supportive home care based on patients’ individual needs. What that pilot program demonstrated is that just by providing individualized supportive home care, it increased survival by 3 months. And that’s the kind of survival benefit we get from some newer drugs for patients with cancer.
That story stuck with me, and it made me realize that if we improve symptom support, symptom management, and access to patient navigation, maybe we can improve survival outcomes, too, and wouldn’t that be great? But even if we weren’t able to improve survival outcomes, if we can improve the cancer experience for patients, that’s still a good outcome. Enhancing patients’ quality of life and making them feel more comfortable as they go through this awful experience with cancer even just a little bit would be a win.
Tracking the Next Breakthroughs in Cancer
The past 5 years have seen incredible advances in blood cancers, especially multiple myeloma. What cancer types do you plan to focus on to advance progress in more effective treatment, especially for difficult-to-treat cancers such as pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma?
Having lost a very close personal friend to glioblastoma, I would love to see improved outcomes in that disease. Pancreatic cancer would be another one, but we just haven’t been able to move the needle much on that cancer either. Even in AML, which has been a focus of my research, where we are making some progress, it’s nothing like the fast-paced progress we are seeing in myeloma. So, they would be three great cancers to tackle.
Ultimately, though, it’s difficult to know where the next big breakthrough is going to come from. I want to make sure that while we have ongoing research that plays to the strengths of our center and expand those strengths, we also expand our clinical enterprise, so our patients have access to expertise across the spectrum of cancer types.
Integrating New Technologies Into Cancer Care
What advances do you envision in cancer prevention and early detection with new technologies such as multicancer early-detection, blood-based tests and artificial intelligence (AI) use in oncology care?
We were the leaders in participant accrual for the PATHFINDER 2 study, which evaluated the safety and performance of the GRAIL Galleri® multicancer early-detection test, and similar tests are in development. It’s incredible to imagine blood tests that can identify 50 different cancers in their early stages. Of course, we have to balance that advancement with the potential problem of overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
We are also learning about high-risk conditions that predispose a person to cancer that raise the possibility of early interception. By that I mean, imagine starting with a high-risk predisposing cancer condition, for example Lynch syndrome, and that there are ways cancer can be prevented with a safe and effective therapy. This could then be extended to patients who had other genetic predispositions that are as high a risk. That would be the ultimate goal. I liken that prospect to what’s already been accomplished in the field of cardiology with cholesterol-lowering medications to prevent heart disease.
We will see progress being made in greater accuracy in the multicancer early-detection tests. The initial tests were set to have a very high specificity to avoid a high rate of false-positive results. But as these tests become better refined, we will see increased sensitivity to detect the presence of cancer while maintaining that high level of specificity to avoid false-positive results. We are just in the first generation of these blood-based multicancer tests, and they will continue to improve over time.
In terms of the integration of AI into oncology care, let’s take the example of prostate cancer, where there clearly is concern about overtreatment. I can imagine using AI to sort through millions of prostate cancer biopsies and their clinical outcomes, which will allow us to discern between which patients are more likely to experience disease progression and require more invasive therapies and those with slow-growing or indolent prostate cancer that can be managed with watchful waiting. The same strategy can be used to cull through millions of breast cancer biopsies and their patterns and clinical outcomes, as well as other cancer types, which would be impossible for a pathologist to do without this technology.
Of course, everything we do using AI will have to be validated through clinical trials. However, there appear to be incredible opportunities right now using this technology to advance progress in cancer.
Making Cancer Less Fearsome
Your research in the development of imatinib for the treatment of CML has converted that cancer into largely a chronic condition patients live with for decades, and some are even potentially cured of the cancer. In the future, will it be possible to cure more cancers, or will more cancers be converted into chronic diseases that patients can live with while receiving ongoing treatment? How do you see the landscape of cancer changing for patients over the next decade?
It’s going to be a little bit of both. I believe more cancers will become curable, and others will be turned into chronic conditions. But in either case, I want to envision the day when hearing the words “You have cancer” is not a fearful and terrifying event. That’s the vision I’d like to see come to fruition for patients. We are not going to eradicate cancer, but if we can turn it into a more preventable and treatable disease, hearing “You have cancer” will no longer be the fearsome diagnosis it is today. And that’s a great future for patients.
Maintaining Scientific Leadership in Cancer Research
The Trump administration’s budget calls for a nearly 40% cut to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and nearly $200 million in NCI grants have already been terminated. How will such disruptions in the funding for cancer research impact ongoing and future cancer research? What concerns do you have about a potential decline in future advances in cancer care?
Declines in research from federal funding and budget cuts will absolutely have a long-term impact on our progress against cancer. There’s never been a better time in history for us to advance more effective therapies for cancer. If we were ever going to double-down on cancer research, now is the time to do it, which makes these cuts especially devastating.
When I tell the story of the development of imatinib, I talk about the 40 years of science that went into the discoveries leading to the work I did in CML. Think about the decades of research that went into the understanding of how the immune system works before the discovery of immunotherapies, including checkpoint inhibitors, to unleash the immune system’s ability to eliminate cancer cells.
Every cancer drug on the market today has a similar story in which decades of discovery have contributed to advances in cancer. Although we might not see decreases in advances in cancer treatment immediately, the long-term consequences will be devastating to our progress, because the science we need to gain ground against cancer takes time. And right now, our ability to accelerate the development of more effective therapies has never been greater.
When I look at our research budget, as generous as the gift from the Knights is and as much as it will help us to continue our basic research efforts, it could never fill the gap left by the loss of funding to the National Institutes of Health and the NCI. For us to continue to lead the world in scientific breakthroughs, we will need continued and sustained federal funding plus philanthropy.
DISCLOSURE: Dr. Druker reported relationships with the following companies that may have a commercial interest in the results of his research: SAB BIO, Cepheid, and RUNX1 Research Program. Dr. Druker owns stock in SAB Biotherapeutics, Aptose Biosciences, Enliven Therapeutics, and Amgen; is on the board of directors of Amgen, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Joint Steering Committee, and the Blood Cancer United’s Beat AML Master Clinical Trial (uncompensated); has served as an advisor to Malta–North American Business Council (uncompensated); has a sponsored research agreement with AstraZeneca, DELiver Therapeutics, and Terns Pharmaceuticals; has received clinical trial funding from AstraZeneca and Novartis; receives royalties from patent 6958335 (Novartis exclusive license), OHSU and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Merck exclusive license), OHSU-CytoImage exclusive license, DELiver Therapeutics nonexclusive license, Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company nonexclusive license; and holds these U.S. patents: 4326534, 6958335, 7416873, 7592142, 10473667, 10664967, and 11049247.
REFERENCE
