$100-Million Gift Will Finance Effort to Fight AIDS and Other Diseases

A software entrepreneur and his wife last week pledged $100-million through their new family foundation to create an institute dedicated to the discovery of an AIDS vaccine.

The institute will eventually focus on other efforts to prevent diseases that attack people’s immune systems.

The money for the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute, $10-million a year over a decade, will be shared by Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Phillip Ragon is the founder of InterSystems Corporation, based in Cambridge, Mass. Susan Ragon is the business’s vice president of finance and administration.

In mid-December, they created the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute Foundation to support the institute.

The announcement comes 16 months after the pharmaceutical company Merck halted further tests of a much-touted HIV vaccine, after it failed to prevent new infections in a clinical trial.

The vaccine’s failure was seen as a major setback in the fight against the AIDS epidemic.

‘Collaborative Effort’

The new institute will seek to solve the scientific problems behind the discovery of an AIDS vaccine by integrating different fields of research.

“So much research is unfunded, and what research is funded is typically conducted in small, isolated labs,” said Mr. Ragon. “It became clear to me that the kind of flexible funding I could provide really was the key to transforming the way scientific research is conducted in this field.”

The Ragon Institute’s inclusion of engineering disciplines in its work is a somewhat unusual approach, as is the collaborative model of scientific research it hopes to foster.

Bruce Walker, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the institute’s new director, said in a statement that the approach “will let top researchers apply their full creative potential to problems of tremendous global importance.”

Housed at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Ragon Institute will also work with other organizations trying to find an AIDS vaccine.

Mr. Ragon said he first met Mr. Walker two years ago, after the researcher learned of his company’s office in South Africa and shared some information about AIDS work there. A couple of weeks later, the two were on a plane to Africa, to visit with AIDS patients.

“You can just imagine how devastating that experience was,” Mr. Ragon said. “And I began to discuss with Bruce what it was I could do to help.”