THE CHANGING FORTUNES OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST

Harvard biology professor and serial entrepreneur Timothy Springer saw promise in a fledgling biotech firm a decade ago and made an early investment. Now, primarily as a result of that bet — on a Cambridge, Massachusetts company called Moderna — he’s a billionaire.

Shares of Moderna, which has a Covid-19 vaccine currently in human clinical trials, rose more than 12% this week, bucking the overall drop in the stock market. That surge has turned Springer into a billionaire: Forbes estimates he is now worth $1 billion based on his 3.5% equity stake in Moderna and stakes in three smaller biotech outfits.

“My philosophy is investing in what you know, and I’m a scientist at heart. I love discovering things,” Springer, 72, told Forbes. “Many scientists start companies but few are successful.

I’m an active investor and also a very rigorous scientist, and that’s why I have a very high batting average.”

On Tuesday, Moderna announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration fast-tracked its Covid-19 vaccine candidate, giving a boost to the firm’s effort to develop the first vaccine for the disease. Moderna was the first company to begin human trials of its vaccine, on March 16 in Seattle, and the company’s shares have nearly tripled in value since the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11.

The breakneck growth had already led to one other Moderna billionaire — CEO Stéphane Bancel, now worth an estimated $2.1 billion.

Besides moonlighting as a billionaire biotech investor, Springer is a professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School,

where he began teaching in 1977 and currently mentors post-doctoral students in his lab. In his research as an immunologist at Harvard, Springer discovered lymphocyte function-associated molecules, which led to the development of several FDA-approved antibody-based drugs.

His first foray into entrepreneurship came in 1993 when he founded the biotech outfit LeukoSite, which he took public in 1998 and sold to Millennium Pharmaceuticals a year later in a deal worth $635 million; Springer got about $100 million of that in Millennium shares.