One of the most successful pharmacist couples in the world are to use their wealth to help students in financial need achieve their dreams at the alma mater which helped launch their careers, De Montfort University Leicester (DMU).

Dr Vijay Patel, Chief Executive Officer of Waymade Healthcare, and his wife Smita will make the single biggest donation by individuals in DMU’s history to provide a series of bursaries and pay for cutting-edge equipment for the university’s Pharmacy department.

Dr Patel, a graduate of DMU’s Leicester School of Pharmacy, and Mrs Patel – herself a pharmacy graduate with first class honours – will donate £1 million to help financially-disadvantaged students and to pay for an extruder, a specialist machine capable of producing medicine at a very high rate.

Dr Patel said he wanted to give something back to the university which helped him achieve his success.

He said, ‘It was at De Montfort University where I learned many of the skills which have helped define my career.

‘Not only academic skills but confidence and ambition, the feeling that I could go into the world and make the future I wanted for myself.

‘Education and the university experience is the bedrock for what we have achieved and we want to be able to help make sure as many people as possible have the chance to experience this.’

After graduating, Dr Patel and his wife opened their first pharmacy in Essex in 1975. The business took off and this in turn fuelled the growth of a chain of chemist shops.

In 1984 the couple, together with Dr Patel’s brother, Bhikhu, founded Waymade Healthcare, a distribution company that supplied medicines for its own chain as well as hospitals, wholesalers and other pharmacies. The success of this enterprise led to the Patels selling all but two of their pharmacies.

In 2003, the group launched a new division, Amdipharm, to acquire and promote branded products globally. Amdipharm grew exponentially, with a presence in over 100 countries at the time of its sale, just nine years later, in 2012.

The bursaries awarded through Dr Patel’s donation will be known as Waymade Scholarships and be available to full-time and part-time undergraduate students, awarded annually from the start of the 2016-17 academic year.