Eli Hurvitz, Founder of Pharmaceutical Giant Teva, Dies at 79

Eli Hurvitz, who began his career washing lab equipment at a drug company and went on to build Teva Pharmaceutical Industries into the largest generic drug maker in the world, died on Monday night. He was 79.His death was announced by Teva. No cause was given, but in an interview with the newspaper Yediot Aharonot earlier this year he said he had cancer. “I am not the type to surrender,” he told the paper. “That is how it was in business, and that is how it is with the illness.”Mr. Hurvitz started out in the 1950s at Assia, a small pharmaceutical company partly owned by his father-in-law, in Petah Tikva, east of Tel Aviv. He became managing director in 1976 and merged Assia with two other small firms, Zori and Teva, to form the company now known as Teva, which means “nature” in Hebrew. Mr. Hurvitz was the president and chief executive of Teva for the next 25 years.Through aggressive mergers and acquisitions, a reputation for quality and low prices, Teva grew into a giant that supplied one of every six prescriptions dispensed in the United States. It has a presence in 60 countries and 45,000 employees. In 2010, it manufactured 63 billion tablets and reached $16 billion in sales.After moving into branded drugs, Teva had a market breakthrough in the 1990s with the introduction of Copaxone, a novel treatment for multiple sclerosis. Developed with researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, it became the first original Israeli drug to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States.Mr. Hurvitz stepped down as chief executive in 2002 and became chairman until 2010, when he retired.Eliyahu Hurvitz was born in Jerusalem in 1932, when the country, then known as Palestine, was under British control. He moved to Tel Aviv with his family as a child. When the state of Israel was founded and the Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1948, Mr. Hurvitz was drafted and spent time on a kibbutz as part of a unit that established agricultural settlements.He went on to study economics at a branch of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Tel Aviv. In 1953, he married Dalia Solomon and began working at Assia.Mr. Hurvitz was awarded the Israel Prize in 2002 for lifetime achievement and his contributions to the state and society. Outside of his business he had been chairman of Bank Leumi, president of the Manufacturers Association of Israel and chairman of theIsrael Democracy Institute, an independent research institute in Jerusalem.In a statement, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, called Mr. Hurvitz one of the country’s great industrialists. “Israeli initiative and the Israeli spirit had no better ambassador,” he said.The current president and chief of Teva, Shlomo Yanai, said Mr. Hurvitz’s “vision of providing access to affordable medicine has helped improve the lives of people around the world.”Mr. Hurvitz is survived by his wife; three children, Vered, Dafna and Haim; and nine grandchildren.