Michael Jaharis

Korean War vet earned law degree at night from DePaul U. Became sales rep for Miles Laboratories. Partnered with Phillip Frost 1972; acquired Key Pharmaceuticals. Increased sales 100-fold with top asthma drug and cardiovascular patch; merged with Schering-Plough for $836 million in 1986. Launched Kos Pharmaceuticals 1988; took public 9 years later. Dominated market with cholesterol-lowering drug Niaspan. Sold to Abbott Labs in 2006 for $4.2 billion. Now invests in health care companies via Vatera Capital, a private equity firm. Donates to Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tufts U. He and his wife, Mary, founded the Jaharis Family Foundation in 1986, which endowed permanent exhibitions in Greek and Byzantine art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2013, during Greece’s fiscal crisis, the foundation pledged $2 million to help relieve hunger and poverty there. Jaharis was a trustee of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, from 1993 to 2003, trustee emeritus and chairman of the board of overseers for its School of Medicine and Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. His son, Steven, graduated from Tufts’s medical school in 1987. His $10 million matching gift helped build the Jaharis Family Center for Biomedical and Nutrition Sciences, which opened on Tufts’s Boston campus in 2002. He received an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree from the school in 2015. He also served on the Columbia University Medical Center’s board of visitors and the board of overseers of the Weill Cornell Medical College and Graduate School of Medical Sciences. He was vice chairman of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocesan Council. He is survived by his wife, the former Mary Spyros, children Steven and Kathryn, and five grandchildren.