YUSUF HAMIED says that right through the pandemic no matter where he has been living – London, Mumbai or Marbella – all he has done is “work, work, work”.
He is not complaining, though – he actually likes working round the clock and across time zones. And as someone with a First and a PhD in chemistry from Cambridge, he can chat to top professors and research scientists all over the world on equal terms. Plus, he has a great ability to make friends.
His company, Cipla, one of the 50 biggest pharma companies in the world with a $2.5-billion turnover, doesn’t actually make vaccines. However, he is fully aware that Covid patients need prolonged treatment. This is why he has been working out the drugs he can make to help poor patients, not just in India but also in Africa and in many other parts of the world. After all, 20 years ago, it was his intervention that saved the lives of millions of HIV patients in Africa.
In response to a request from Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, he put up a Cipla factory in Kampala in 2000. This was approved by the World Health Organization, enabling it to export its anti-AIDs drugs to other African countries. He was taken aback when he received a thank you letter from a grateful Ugandan government in September last year, telling him the thoroughfare opposite the factory was now called the “Yusuf Hamied Road” in his honour.
Back in Bombay (now Mumbai), the square opposite the Cipla offices was named the Dr K A Hamied Chowk in the 1970s, after his late father, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, who founded Chemical, Industrial & Pharmaceutical Laboratories in 1935 after Mahatma Gandhi had said it was important for India to make its own medicines rather than depend on expensive imports from the west.
Following the example set by his legendary father, his even more illustrious son has gifted numerous donations both to Cambridge University and to Christ’s College, his own beloved alma mater.
At Christ’s, there is already a Hamied (Lecture) Centre, not far from statues of Charles Darwin and Jagadish Chandra Bose, two old boys; and student accommodation outside called Hamied House, Hamied Lodge and Hamied Hall. A new building, Hamied Court, currently under construction, will open next year. It will stand next to the new Todd building, named after Lord Alexander Todd, a former Master of Christ’s and Nobel Laureate, who admitted a young Yusuf to the college.
At the chemistry labs, where he arrived as an 18-year-old undergraduate from Bombay in 1954, there is now a ToddHamied Meeting Room, a Todd-Hamied Laboratory, and in 2018, the 1702 chair in chemistry, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the world, was named after Hamied.
In November last year, when Cambridge University renamed its entire chemistry department after Hamied, he summed up his life’s work and his philosophy: “Since leaving Cambridge in 1960, I have been totally involved with healthcare and the pharma industry primarily in India. We laid the foundation for basic drug manufacture in our country. We fought with the government and persuaded them to change the laws covering intellectual property, so that there was no monopoly in three major areas – agriculture, food and health.
Consequently, the Indian pharmaceutical industry thrived and today is considered the ‘pharmacy centre of the world’. Over the years, my mission has been ‘to access quality, affordable drugs for all and that none should be denied’. For this, I sincerely believe that there should be no divide between the developed, emerging and third world in healthcare.”
This applies as much to Covid as it did with HIV when he supplied life-saving drugs at a dollar a day, which was at or even below cost price.
With Covid, something he said early on that has now become conventional wisdom: “My general feeling is that Covid-19 has come to stay – it will never disappear.”
He spells it out: “My contention is that Covid has come to stay like flu has come to stay and malaria is there to stay and other diseases like asthma is there to stay. I think in the future Covid is there to stay. Therefore, we have to tackle it as best as possible, first by vaccinations, and later on by treatment.”
He goes on: “I will tell you what my personal thing has been – what can we, in pharmaceuticals, do for treatment?”
He markets what he describes as “the top three drugs today” for Covid.
They are Favipiravir, “a drug invented in Japan and not in Europe” and made and sold in India as Ciplenza; Remdesivir, which is also now manufactured by Cipla and marketed as Cipremi; and, finally, a Roche product, Tocilizumab, which he markets as Actemra.
He also manufactures a number of supplements such as Vitamin D, in the form of chewable tablets, “which is good for improving your immunity”; and steroid aerosols, a field in which Cipla is a market leader.
He thinks a time may come when the Covid vaccine could be taken as an oral drop, rather in the way people are protected against polio. “I have a friend in Hong Kong working on that.”
Britain’s MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) has cleared the products made by Cipla’s factories in India, in locations such as Goa, Bangalore, Pune, Baddi Malpur in Himachal Pradesh, and in Sikkim.
Cipla’s business in the UK now exceeds £15 million, with the NHS buying 30 different drugs from the firm at competitive prices. Business in Europe is worth £120m.
Now that he is 84, Hamied says: “One has to give way to the younger generation. I am now non-executive chairman of Cipla.”
But whatever the title, he remains Cipla’s leader and guiding light and one of the most influential figures in the world of pharmaceuticals. When the chemistry department was named after him at the end of last year – the new name will remain until at least 2050 – the university’s vice chancellor, Professor Stephen Toope, extended his “boundless gratitude on behalf of all of Cambridge University”.
The fund will finance scholarships for professors and PhD students “in perpetuity”. Prof James Keeler, head of the department, thanked Hamied for “a transformational gift”.
He has also extended the agreement he already has with the Royal Society to send scientists to India on lecture tours by five years.
But when Hamied spoke to GG2, he wanted to emphasise one overriding message about the need for people to take the Covid vaccine: “The sad thing about Covid is that 0.1 per cent of the population who get it die – and die within a week, 10 days, 20 days, when other diseases like asthma or even HIV are not a death sentence. The people who die have had underlining health problems like heart or diabetes or lung which makes them more susceptible.
“By taking the vaccine, you’re protecting others. You’re not going to transmit the virus.