On Sept. 7, 2018, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) announced the official completion of the Knight Cancer Research Building, a facility dedicated to the mission of ending cancer as we know it. The 320,000-square-foot building’s unique design will bring together people from different scientific disciplines with the goal of accelerating research progress.

The Oregon State Legislature provided $160 million of the total $190 million in funding for the seven-floor facility, with the remaining $30 million coming from the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.

The openig celebration takes place just five years after Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, issued a $1 billion fundraising challenge to OHSU which was successfully completed in June 2015, after 22 months.

With a capacity of 650 occupants, the building will house the majority of researchers contributing to the Knight Cancer Institute’s mission. The building will house CEDAR — Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center — the first large-scale early cancer detection program of its kind. CEDAR is led by nanotechnology expert Sadik Esener, Ph.D.

Key building features include intellectual and social hubs; centralized, shared equipment and research core facilities; and an open laboratory design, all with the intent to foster collaborative work. The research labs are a balanced mix of wet labs, which use liquids, chemicals or drugs to conduct experiments, and dry labs, which use computers or computer-generated models in analyzing biological data.