It's not a typical college professor who is also a billionaire, even if they do specialize in immunology at Harvard Medical School. But that's what sets Tim Springer apart from most of his peers, thanks to his early founding investment in Moderna, best known as one of the companies that developed a COVID-19 vaccine. Now, it's come out that Springer has given a substantial chunk of his fortune back to medical science in the form of a $210 million donation to the Institute for Protein Innovation in Boston, a nonprofit organization devoted to protein science, and which he also founded.
In a press statement from IPI, Springer is quoted as saying that the organization represents his "legacy project," and something he thinks could aid medical research significantly in the future:
"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…IPI is my legacy project and recognizes the role that monoclonal antibodies have played in my discovery and basic research."
Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Springer previously donated $40 million to IPI after founding the org in 2017. And it all comes from the scientist's passion for proteins. As he told Forbes: "Proteins are the machines of life and we found that antibodies give you a wonderful means of examining the machines of life."
Though the gift is only now being reported, Springer actually made it back towards the end of 2020, with an aim towards bringing IPI up to scale, hiring more personnel, upgrading equipment, and more.
Springer's story is a pretty interesting one. He made a $5 million founding investment in Moderna, owning five percent of the company's stock when it went public in 2018. He made the investment with funds from an earlier business venture in the world of medical science, having founded a company called LeukoSite in the early 90s, eventually selling it to Millennium Pharmaceuticals for $635 million, plus another $100 million in shares of Millennium. That made him a wealthy man, but the Moderna stock pushed him into billionaire status, and his $210 million donation to IPI was reportedly made via stock in multiple different biotech companies.
While that journey has made Springer one of the wealthiest college professors of all time, he's not quite the richest. That would be David Cheriton, who back in the late 90s had two computer science students at Stanford University who would come to him with an investment opportunity. They were, of course, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the project they were working on was the search engine and now technology powerhouse known as Google. That early investment of $100,000 eventually made Cheriton a billionaire and the richest college professor in history, and right now his net worth is pegged at $5 billion.
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