Jul 29, 2014 12:02 PM EDT By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Oregon Health and Science University received a donation of $100 million to fuel its ambitious vision to stop cancer in its tracks, school officials announced.

The anonymous donor pledged the funds as part of the university's unprecedented $1 billion campaign to support the Knight Cancer Institute's initiative to revolutionize the early detection and treatment of cancer. The gidt puts the campaign over $400 million mark in record time.

The donation comes less than one year into the two-year fundraising effort. It is the largest private donation to the campaign to date and one of the four largest pledges in Oregon Health and Science University's history.

"On behalf of everyone at [the university], I want to express our deep gratitude to this generous and visionary donor, whose request to remain anonymous we gladly honor," school President Joe Robertson said. "Gifts of this size are not made without a great deal of thought, and we embrace the opportunity and responsibility of using this investment to take the next giant leap against cancer. We have the chance to impact the lives of millions of cancer patients and their families, and to do so sooner rather than later."

School officials said they will use the multi-million dollar gift to support a full range of Knight Cancer Institute initiatives, including hiring 20 to 30 top scientists and their teams to collaborate on improving methods to identify cancer at its earliest and most curable stage.

 The school's $1 billion campaign will enable these scientists to focus on discovery and moving the most promising new detection methods and treatments from the laboratory to clinical trials as quickly as possible.

"This gift is a tremendous vote of confidence in OHSU and the Knight Cancer Institute. It will enable us to work even more quickly on what we believe is the single most important unmet need in cancer care today - identifying cancers that will become deadly while they are still at a highly curable stage," Brian Druker, director of the Knight Cancer Institute, said in a statement. "While we clearly have much more to do to reach our goal, a gift of this magnitude is a validation that our vision resonates with those who have a passion for fighting cancer in a completely different way. OHSU will be the place where we will do what others have thought impossible - end cancer as we know it."

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