Skip to main content
Last September, anxiety was spreading in one of Portland’s most prominent scientific research operations, with rumors of layoffs on the horizon. Last week, it became official: The Knight Cancer Institute is slashing dozens of jobs.
Fifty-nine people were “impacted by the reductions in force,” according to Oregon Health & Science University’s media office. The cuts will hit multiple realms of the institute but they are concentrated at the Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center, where 30 jobs are being eliminated.
News of the cuts, focused in the center’s CEDAR research operation and another called SMMART, comes less than a year after the institute announced a mighty $2 billion windfall from the Nike fortune of Phil and Penny Knight.
“Its kind of a mystery to us why some of our premier, flagship research programs, early detection and precision medicine, are getting their funding cut in the wake of such a large donation,” Wes Horton, vice president of the research worker union, tells WW.
But leaders at OHSU, which is tied to the institute, say the Knight cash was earmarked for new programs—rather than for keeping already-existing ones afloat. Also, an OHSU spokesperson says, “the institute must budget sustainably in a rough climate for research funding.”
The media office did not answer a question about the total number of workers in the Knight Cancer Institute’s employ. But American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees spokesman David Kreisman says the union represents about 550 staff at the research center—a total that would not include management.
CEDAR is known for its alternative research structure, less hierarchical than the conventional model that orbits around a principal investigator. CEDAR was also, according to an OHSU spokesperson, one of the few institutions focused on early detection when it was founded in 2017.
Times have apparently changed. “Today, thanks in part to the dedicated work and partnerships within CEDAR, the field has evolved and is shifting toward interception, aiming to treat more patients identified as being at high risk for cancer,” the OHSU spokesperson says. “As part of the overall effort to ensure the long-term sustainability of OHSU’s research enterprise, CEDAR is refocusing on a limited number of projects.”
Knight Cancer Institute leadership has been crafting these changes since November, according to an email last week to CEDAR staff from CEO Brian Druker and associate CEO Shivaani Kummar, which WW reviewed.
And the news comes amid a broader change of emphasis at the institute, which seems to be directing its resources in large part toward cancer care as such, rather than research. “In the same way that CEDAR has helped set the global standard for early detection, the Knight Cancer Institute is embarking on a new strategic direction to transform cancer care and set a new standard globally,” Druker and Kummar’s email said.
This means, they wrote, that though early detection remains a research priority, CEDAR’s budget “will need to be significantly adjusted,” resulting in the “difficult decision to reduce some positions.”
CEDAR is not the only affected Knight Cancer Institute unit. A part of the “precision oncology program” known as Serial Measurements of Molecular and Architectural Responses to Therapy (SMMART, for short) is seeing 12 jobs eliminated, an OHSU spokesperson says, adding that “precision medicine will continue to be a focus for the Knight Cancer Institute, with basic and translational research in precision oncology happening in other programs.”
Meanwhile, the spokesperson says, an additional 17 Knight Cancer institute employees had their positions eliminated due to a lack of independent funding—i.e., their research grants expired.
All of this is going on amid a broader change in the governance of the Knight Cancer Institute. In a somewhat byzantine arrangement, the Knight donation, announced last August, created a new entity, the Knight Cancer Group, which is established to lead the Knight Cancer Institute and manage OHSU’s cancer services under the OHSU Hospital license.
In January, the Knight Cancer Group announced a new CEO, an outsider named Joel Helmke, who was slated to start in March.
Horton, the research worker union leader and a computational biologist himself, says aspects of this broader reorganization have felt “relatively opaque.” But the same AFSCME contract persists through these changes, and he says the union is focused on continuity for the affected workers.
At least half of the employees who got layoff notices have AFSCME representation and by contract will for a period get first crack at applying for new jobs that open up at OHSU, Horton says. “Our hope as the union would be that OHSU would recognize that these are real people whose lives are being affected.”
