The spending by the Novo Nordisk Foundation will help create a research centre studying vaccines for respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza which will be part of the University of Copenhagen, the foundation said by email.

It will also establish a limited liability company that will license and develop vaccine technologies and coordinate clinical testing of promising candidates.

The foundation, one of the wealthiest charities in the world, is benefiting from the massive growth of Novo Nordisk and its popular drugs.

Novo Nordisk in October raised its sales expectations amid unprecedented demand for its weight-loss drug Wegovy and diabetes medicine Ozempic, and paid a record interim dividend to investors in the summer.

“The growth in the value of the Novo Group companies will allow us to increase our grant-giving and philanthropic investments in the coming years more than we might have expected,” Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, the head of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, said in an emailed reply to questions.

This includes developing more initiatives similar in scale to the vaccine project, where decade-long commitment of resources are often required, he said.