Congratulations to Dr. William C. Campbell, joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2015. While working at Merck & Company, Bill was initially hired at Merck by Ashton Cuckler (a UNL graduate in Parasitology and who worked with H.W. Manter), Dr. Campbell focussed a part of his time on the development of the anti-nematode drug Avermectin. Ivermectin was developed further from this isolate from soil bacteria initially discovered on a golf course, isolated, and grown by Sitoshi Ohmura (co-winner of the prize), at Kitasato University (Japan). The drug was subsequently distributed free to countries that wanted it, by Merck & Company, to treat the filarioid nematodes that cause riverblindness and  lymphatic filariasis. Ivermectin is now recognized as one of the world's most important animal and human medicines ever produced, one of the foremost public health interventions ever in the developing world, and seen to rival penicillin for its beneficial impact on global health - with over 300 million people using the compound annually.

Read more:

(1) http://courses.umass.edu/mic590s/2009/Reading/Omura2004.pdf

(2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043740/