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Ivan Villax was fond of saying he had left his country aged 23 with a toothbrush in one pocket, a chemical engineering diploma in the other and the Russians at his heels.
Born in 1925 in Magyaóvár, a small town in Hungary just East of Vienna, his mother was of Austro-Hungarian landowner stock and his father a Hungarian scientist. In 1948, while the family was in a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, a letter from Professor Victoria Pires, then Secretary of State for Agriculture in the Portuguese government, invited Ivan's father to come to Portugal. Ödon Villax was to help establish an agronomy research center into plant genetics in Portugal such as those he had run in Hungary. Ivan arrived in Lisbon a little later to join his family after working at the Centre de Recherches Agronomiques de Clermont-Ferrand in France.
He knew then that antibiotics were to be his future and while in France he had isolated from soil samples some tetracycline producing strains that he later named Streptomyces lusitanus. He joined the Instituto Pasteur de Lisboa in 1952, then one of the leading pharmaceutical laboratories in the country.
His first inventions were in the area of chloramphenicol preparation and tetracycline and penicillin fermentation. During this period he made good use of Prof. Maia Loureiro’s equipment, the inventor of submerged aerobic fermentation. This Portuguese technology had been instrumental in solving the industrial challenges of penicillin fermentation during World War 2.
In 1958 he wed Diane Du Boulay; and together with two other Hungarians, Nicholas de Horthy and Andrew Onody, they founded Hovione in 1959. During the first 10 years the company was a research laboratory located in the basement of the family house in Lisbon, not far from the American and British embassies. As Ivan made chemistry in test tubes, Diane typed out invoices and for the next 45 years they made an amazing team.
A close collaboration developed with Fermentfarma Spa, Milan - a company also run by Hungarian refugees - Villax became the technical director and a minority shareholder. Technology for the fermentation and isolation of tetracyclines was licensed to Imperial Chemical Industries of the UK, National Fermentation of South Africa, and to International rectifier of El Segundo, California among others. In 1967 Rachelle Laboratories bought out Fermentfarma and the proceeds of Ivan Villax’s share were used to build the first Hovione plant in Loures, just outside Lisbon.
Growing tired of the unpredictability of fermentation processes, he directed his research efforts to chemical synthesis. In the Loures plant he developed and industrialized an 18 consecutive step process to produce betamethasone and its derivatives, and throughout the 70s Hovione enjoyed a privileged position in Japan, thanks to Villax's independent process patents. As the business grew, and Portugal went through some troubled times after the 1974 revolution, Ivan sent his children to finish their studies in England and started looking for a location for further expansion. A Hong Kong office was established in 1978, and in the same year Hovione's first purchasing visit to the Canton fair took place. One after the other his four children spent a few years working in the Far East; it was all part of giving them the best possible education.
By 1982 the Loures plant had expanded and got organised to supply the US generic market with semi-synthetic antibiotics; the Macau plant went on stream in 1985 to provide additional capacity. This was prior to the Roche-Bolar amendment, and at FDA for several years people remembered how samples of doxycycline were provided at 9am at their Fishers Lane Rockville, Maryland offices, and not a minute too early, or too late, before the innovator’s patent expired. In Europe this product generated extensive patent litigation with Pfizer suing a number of Hovione customers in 8 different countries. True to his beliefs, Villax volunteered as co-defendant in every suit. His tenaciousness in the face of such adversity meant he did not give up and eventually the matter was settled out of court in 1992. This dispute diverted Villax’s efforts from following other creative pursuits much to his disappointment; though throughout this time the industry recognized in Hovione a fighting spirit that was a characteristic of its founder. Today the generic industry worldwide benefits from Hovione's efficient processes in the production of many other active ingredients: minocycline, roxithromycin, are products where Hovione retains a leading role in several countries.
Ivan Villax was always grateful to the country that welcomed him and allowed him to make a new life. He was happy that in providing generic contrast media Hovione was somehow celebrating Prof. Egas Moniz, a Portuguese Nobel Laureate, the father of angiography.
After the fall of the Berlin wall he made frequent visits to Hungary. The Technical University of Budapest, his Alma Mater, awarded him a PhD in recognition for his 40 years of work in pharmaceutical chemistry and he was made a member of the University's Senate. By then he had authored over 100 patents and scientific articles.
In 1995 his health started to weaken and he made arrangements for an organised hand-over of his responsibilities. With the business in the hands of a professional management team led by his son Guy, Ivan Villax still came to the Loures plant on a daily basis, keen on being kept informed on the new chemistries and on the performance of the business, and quick to point out any slack in the rigour, discipline or housekeeping in either the labs or the manufacturing facilities. Every year, together with Diane, he visited the Macau plant keen to encourage the younger generation and to acknowledge the service of long-standing staff.
In his last years he saw Hovione becoming an important producer of HIV protease inhibitors, a key medicine in the fight against AIDS, and taking an active role in many drug development projects as the provider of the active ingredient. In 2002 Hovione established a pilot plant in New Jersey, not far from Rahway where in the 50s Villax had turned down an offer for a position at Merck's research laboratories. He and Diane traveled the world, whereby he was able to satisfy one of his other passions, collecting plants from exotic locations, planting and nurturing them in his quinta outside Lisbon.
This May, after a severe deterioration of his lung condition, Ivan, ever the fighter, ever determined to control his own fate, realized that hospitals and science could do no more for him and asked to be taken home. At his quinta in Manique surrounded by his flowers and his trees, with his children, grand-children and his wife Diane, his life-long partner, he lived another two happy weeks - he died on Friday June 6th.
Church services will be celebrated at the Igreja Matriz of Loures at noon, and at the Basilica da Estrela, in Lisbon, at 7pm on June 12th.
