Cyrus Poonawalla on R&D and Innovation

Poonawalla founded the Serum Institute of India in 1966 and built it into the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, supplying over 140 countries. Wikipedia notes the company produces more than 1.5 billion doses annually of vaccines for measles, polio and the flu. The scale of this single private company is what later enabled India to anchor the global COVID-19 vaccination response.

Recognition listed by Wikipedia includes the Padma Shri in 2005 for contributions to medicine, the Padma Bhushan in 2022 for contribution in production of vaccines during COVID-19 in the field of Trade and Industry, Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year for Healthcare & Life Sciences in November 2007 and Entrepreneur of the Year for India in February 2015. The awards trace a two-decade arc that culminated with the COVID-era honor.

Wikipedia notes honorary doctorates from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in June 2018 and the University of Oxford in June 2019, the ICMR Lifetime Achievement Medal for contribution in healthcare conferred by Bill Gates in November 2019, the Lokmanya Tilak National Award in August 2021, and the Dean's Medal from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in May 2022.

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.

Poonawalla explicitly positions himself as a philanthropist throughout: 'our price is low, I've been giving vaccines at 50 cents a dose and nobody could compete with this'. Serum was pre-qualified by WHO and the UK's MHRA, on which basis the company could make three billion doses of vaccine, including substantial COVID production.

NPR opens by noting the Poonawallas — Cyrus as founder and Adar as CEO of Serum Institute — run the world's largest vaccine-producing company in the world's largest vaccine-producing nation. Serum makes vaccines for measles, tetanus, diphtheria, hepatitis and many other diseases, specializes in generic versions, exports to 170 countries, and estimates that two-thirds of the world's children are inoculated with its 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.

The manufacturing partnership with Oxford-AstraZeneca began, NPR explains, when a tiny 1-milliliter vial arrived by courier from Oxford in May 2020 containing the components of a viral vector vaccine. Oxford supplied a weakened adenovirus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees, into which they had inserted a coronavirus protein; they also supplied cell substrate to grow the vaccine, plus technology transfer from AstraZeneca.