The Picower Foundation, a large US charity that funds medical research, has collapsed after losing money in a fraudulent US$50-billion (£34-million) investment scheme run by businessman Bernard Madoff.

The Florida-based foundation was set up in 1989 and had distributed a total of $268 million in grants, including a $50-million donation in 2002 to fund the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The foundation had assets of $1 billion invested in Madoff's scheme, and it is unclear whether any of these funds will be recovered.

Other organizations hit by the fraud include Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, which had put $20 million into the scheme, and the American Technion Society, a science-education charity in New York, which had made a $72-million investment.