Timothy Springer, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, listens during an interview at … [+]
Springer, a Harvard immunology professor, made a huge fortune as a founding investor in Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna. He is hoping his gift will spur further medical innovation.
Harvard Medical School professor and entrepreneur Tim Springer, who became a billionaire as a result of his early investment in vaccine maker Moderna, has donated $210 million to the Institute for Protein Innovation (IPI), a Boston-based nonprofit research organization focused on protein science. The institute announced the gift Wednesday, though the donation was made by Springer, his wife Chafen Lu and their children in December 2020.
Springer, 75, is an immunologist who has been at Harvard for 46 years, where he is a professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology. He is worth $1.9 billion by Forbes estimates. He cofounded IPI in 2017 and previously donated $40 million to the institute.
“I founded IPI on the premise that a foundry for protein tools, and most importantly antibodies, would help scientists make discoveries, and possibly new therapeutics, for years to come; my gift will help realize this vision,” Springer said in a statement. “IPI is my legacy project and recognizes the role that monoclonal antibodies have played in my discovery and basic research.”
IPI focuses on providing antibodies and protein-based tools to the scientific community. The organization creates synthetic antibodies and proteins (rather than using antibodies acquired from mice and lab animals) and sells them to scientific researchers.
“Proteins are the machines of life and we found that antibodies give you a wonderful means of examining the machines of life,” Springer told Forbes.
Springer says the donation will help scale the institute, bring in new technologies and recruit a higher caliber of professionals. He said the donation was made via a gift of shares he owns in a variety of biotech companies, including Moderna.
With $5 million, Springer was a founding investor in Moderna, and when the company went public in December 2018, he owned just over 5% of its shares. An earlier entrepreneurial endeavor had provided Springer with the funds to invest in Moderna. He founded biotech firm LeukoSite in 1993, took it public in 1998 and sold it to Millenium Pharmaceuticals the following year for $635 million in stock. Springer got about $100 million worth of Millenium shares from the deal.
Springer decided to launch the institute after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, in England, with César Milstein, an Argentine biochemist who received the Nobel Prize for his work with antibody technology. Springer continued building on their discoveries once he returned to the United States but he says the technology was only available at for-profit companies, inspiring him to expand into the nonprofit sector.
IPI’s president and CEO Ken Fasman calls the donation “transformative,” adding that the organization will now “be able to take on more challenging problems in protein science that academia and industry cannot or will not.”
Springer, who sits on the board of IPI, has been long involved in the biotech industry. In addition to his founding stake in Moderna, he owns stakes in Selecta Biosciences, Scholar Rock and Morphic Therapeutic. He’s also the founder of and investor in two private companies, Seismic Therapeutics and Tectonic Therapeutics.
IPI is not Springer’s sole philanthropic endeavor; he has endowed chairs at Harvard Medical School, the Boston Children’s Hospital and the University of California, Berkeley.
Springer is one of just a select few professors who have become billionaires. Robert Langer, an MIT chemical engineering professor, also became a billionaire in 2020 based on his investment in Moderna. David Cheriton, a computer science professor at Stanford University, became a billionaire as a result of an early investment in Google.