IN THE pharmaceutical world, there are many giant multinationals but there is probably no individual more influential or respected than Yusuf Hamied of Cipla. Dr Hamied, who is chairman of the Indian pharma company, has ploughed millions into charitable causes aimed at helping the march of medical science. He has always believed that selling medicines cannot ever be just a cold hearted profit and loss transactional business.
He says there has to be a humanitarian aspect to pharmacy, which is why in the late 1990s and thereafter, he stepped in when HIV was raging across Africa. It was a virtual death sentence for anyone with AIDS. Patients could not afford the drugs that western companies were marketing. So, Hamied ensured that Cipla supplied a cocktail of retroviral drugs at the cost of “a dollar a day”, which saved an estimated 10 to 15 million people. The Indian high commissioner in London, Vikram Doraiswami, recalled Hamied’s contribution in the battle against AIDS when he ad dressed a function last summer at Christ’s College, Cambridge. This was Hamied’s alma mater where he had once done an undergraduate degree and a PhD in chemistry before returning to India in 1960 to begin working at Cipla, a company his father had founded in 1935.
Doraiswami was speaking at the inauguration of “Hamied Court”, a four-storey building at Christ’s with 64 rooms for postgraduates and fellows from around the world. It was funded by a charitable foundation set up by Hamied and his wife, Farida. Doraiswami recommended a film, Fire in the Blood, on how Hamied had angered western pharma giants by undercutting their astronomic prices. “For those of you who have not seen this documentary directed by a Canadian filmmaker, Dylan Gray, I do urge you to watch it, because you will understand why I hold Yusuf Hamied in the highest personal esteem,” the high commissioner said. Hamied, he remarked, had made a difference to countless lives. “And that is not something we can all tell our maker – whenever we get to see our maker.” Dr Hamied, who is now 87 and lives for part of the year in London, told GG2 Power List: “I’m not doing day to day work. But I’m definitely involved with the company (Cipla) particularly in three areas – R&D, portfolio, and al so pipeline which refers to be the new products we’re going to launch in the next couple of years.” “With drugs there’s always obsolescence and newer drugs come and replace the older drugs,” he said. “But the big problem we are very much concerned about right now is AMR (anti-microbial resistance).
They’re estimating that if this is not controlled, five to 10 million lives would be lost in the next decade because the drugs will no longer be effective.” Giving his view of what is happening in the world on pharmacy, Hamied said: “The whole system of pharmaceuticals worldwide is one of monopoly. You have intellectual proper ty, and you don’t let others enter your line.” He emphasised that scientific research in the field was essential: “Scientists are going in the direction of personalised medicine or gene therapy.” In one project called CAR-T, “they take the T cells (a type of white blood cell) from your body, treat it outside in the lab and reinject the T cells back into your body. I’m sure that’s the way people will be treated in the future. And then companies like ours will have to look at it.” Hamied has been a generous benefactor to the chemistry department at Cambridge University, where he had once been a student.
The 1702 chair in chemistry at Cambridge, the oldest in the discipline, was renamed the Yusuf Hamied 1702 Chair of Chemistry in 2018. Two years, the entire chemistry department was renamed the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry in recognition of his “transformative donation”. Two additional labs with Hamied’s name – one headed by Prof Jeremy Sanders, a former head of the department – and another that pays tribute to the late Chris Abell, who was a professor of biological chemistry – are doing research in organic and applied chemistry. “The drug industry has become very, very advanced in biotechnology and gene therapy,” he pointed out. “Both Oxford and Cambridge are in the forefront of this development.” He said he had taken shares inRnavate, a company set up by Sir Shankar Balasubramani an, professor of medicinal chemistry at Cam bridge, who is famed for his work on gene sequencing and trying to find drugs that will not damage healthy cells when targeting individual cancers. The company researching gene therapy is jointly being partnered by Nobel Laureate Prof Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, an authority on ribosomes. Hamied said: “Whatever Shankar and Venki are planning to do will be good for humanity.
” Meanwhile, Hamied remains the fulcrum around which Cipla turns. He said: “Cipla is a leading drug company in India. In terms of local turnover, we are among the leaders in India. Turnover this year was $3 billion (£2.4bn). The proportion (of medicines) that goes abroad is 60 per cent while 40 per cent remains in India. Our major overseas markets are South Africa and the US. We have a footprint in Europe as well and it’s improving day by day. In all, we export to 180 countries. Cipla is a public limited company and the ‘promoters’ – that is the Hamied family – has a 34 per cent holding.” Another reason why the world looks to Hamied is because “India is regarded as the pharmacy capital of the world”.
He said that “30 per cent of the drugs sold in America have their origins in India”. Hamied has to keep abreast of the latest developments in biochemistry so that he knows which drugs to manufacture. “When there were hard copies, I used to get at least 50 magazines a month connected with medical and chemistry. Now, most of these are online.
My librarian gets them all and sends me the content pages by email. I go through the content pages and mark the articles I want. She then sends the hard copies of the articles by courier from Mumbai.” Although Hamied started out as an academic, “I am now very keen on implementation”. He was very impressed with the Cambridge economist Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, author of the landmark review, The Eco nomics of Biodiversity, and has been thinking about how pharmacy will be affected by temperature rises and climate change.
“In the next 30-40 years the population of the earth will go up by 700 million. That is the estimate. With so many more human beings, the earth’s temperature increases. To avoid the effects of what’s going to happen in the world, family planning is also vital. I never thought of this until I met Partha Dasgupta. And what I am planning to do in Cambridge, if possible, is to have a think tank of intellectuals who can think of biodiversity, and this should be under somebody like Partha Dasgupta. I have already set up a group on biodiversity in India."
