NYU Doctor Donates $105 Million to School
By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer Fri Aug 12, 1:33 PM ET
NEW YORK - A microbiology professor who fled the Nazis as a child, then made a fortune inventing a drug for rheumatoid arthritis plans to give the New York University School of Medicine a $105 million donation.
Dr. Jan T. Vilcek, who has been on the faculty at NYU's medical school for 40 years, said he felt grateful to the institution for nurturing his research.
"NYU gave me a faculty position when I came to this country. I was 31 and had no prior experience anywhere outside communist Czechoslovakia," Vilcek said in a telephone interview Friday. "It was a courageous thing for NYU to do. They took a risk, and I think it worked out."
The gift, which the medical school said is the largest it has ever received, will endow professorships and fellowships, support research and faculty recruiting efforts, improve facilities and enhance programs in basic sciences.
The donation will consist of royalties Vilcek has earned from the sale of Remicade, an anti-inflammatory agent that, in addition to treating rheumatoid arthritis, can help people with Crohn's disease, ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis.
Vilcek and an adjunct professor at the school, Junming Le, developed an antibody that is the basis for the drug, then collaborated with a biotechnology company now owned by Johnson & Johnson to turn it into a medicine.
Because the total amount of the royalties generated by Remicade sales is still unknown, the gift could eventually exceed $105 million, the medical school said.
Vilcek, 72, was born in Bratislava, Slovakia, to a Jewish family that eluded capture during the Holocaust. After the war, he became a doctor in what was then communist Czechoslovakia. He said he and his wife defected to the West in 1964 after obtaining government permission, "probably by mistake," to visit Austria.
He began working at NYU as an assistant microbiology professor.
NYU, which is in the midst of a campaign to raise $2.5 billion in new donations, said it will name a floor in a new research facility and several new labs after Vilcek and his wife, Marica Vilcek.