Cyrus Poonawalla on Bootstrapping

In Poonawalla's telling to Asian Racing Report, the horses came first: the horses at Poonawalla Stud Farm in the 1960s provided the raw means for him to build a business of global significance — and it did not come from racing or selling them. 'Horse serum. I went into the business of making serums and then vaccines,' he says.

Poonawalla explains the science plainly: in those days, some serums were made from horse blood worldwide. You give a vaccine to a horse — a mouse works but a larger animal yields more blood — and from the blood you process the active serum, sterilize and process it, eventually producing the final product.

Poonawalla and his younger brother Zavaray established Serums Institute of India in 1966 with starting capital of about US$25,000, growing from serums (which had limited use) into vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, pneumonia, measles, and eventually the COVID vaccines Covovax and Covishield.

NPR captures the founding story: the property that houses Serum has been a stud farm since 1946, and part of it still is. The Poonawallas are a wealthy family of racehorse breeders (and collectors of luxury cars, including a Batmobile replica). In the 1960s they would donate retired racehorses to the government's Haffkine Institute, which used the horses' blood to develop serums and vaccines.

In 1966 a snake bit one of the Poonawallas' horses. The Haffkine lab had anti-venom serum but needed government permission to administer it — permission that took four days to arrive from Bombay because telephone lines were unreliable. The mare died, and the bureaucratic delay that caused her death gave Cyrus Poonawalla the idea of making the serums himself.