The founder of the Israeli pharmaceutical giant Teva, Eli Hurvitz, died at the age of 79 early Tuesday at a hospital near Tel Aviv after two years of fight with cancer, according to a company spokesman.
Born in Jerusalem in 1932, Hurvitz dropped out of school at 16 to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He then joined a youth movement that founded Kibbutz Tel-Katzir, a collective farming community bordering Kinneret.
Hurvitz launched his business career at Asya, a local drug maker, while still studied economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He started out as a dishwasher in the company's laboratory but soon climbed up the ranks to assist in mergers and acquisitions.
In 1976, Hurvitz was appointed CEO of Teva, which merged Asya along with two other drug manufactures. He began to serve as chairman of the board in 2002 and kept that position until his illness forced him to retire eight years later.
Hurvitz is credited with turning Teva from a local business group that initially employed 400 people into one of Israel's most profitable companies and the world's leading producer of generic drugs with revenues totaling 16.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2010.
It is currently the largest company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the seventh-largest corporation traded on Nasdaq, with an estimated market value of 36 billion U.S. dollars.
One of the Teva's greatest successes under Hurvitz's leadership was Copaxone, a patented drug developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. Since its approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1996, it has generated profits of billions of dollars for Teva, as well as Azilect, a branded drug for treating Parkinson's disease.
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