‘Prince of Vaccines’ behind the drugs supply behemoth
KNOWN as the ‘Prince of Vaccines’, Adar Poonawalla is so rich that his personal office is a converted Airbus A320.
His Mumbai home has featured in the pages of Vogue, his art collection includes works by Van Gogh and Picasso, and he converted a Mercedes into a Batmobile for his son’s sixth birthday.
The 40-year-old chief executive of the Serum Institute of India can boast that his company is the biggest vaccine manufacturer in the world by number of doses produced and sold.
An estimated two-thirds of children worldwide have received a jab from the company, including the polio vaccine, MMR and BCG injections.
But Serum began as a simple idea dreamed up by his father, Cyrus. The racehorse breeder realised his horses could provide life-saving products.
When retired animals were injected with a small amount of venom or bacteria, their serum – the fluid part of the blood – produced anti-venom for snake bites and tetanus antitoxin, which
Indians desperately needed. The Serum Institute, established in 19 , moved on to tetanus vaccines and other jabs that were scarce and had to be imported at high prices.
Cyrus Poonawalla is now reportedly India’s sixth richest man, worth more than £9billion. Such has been the firm’s success that the firm aims to produce more than a billion doses of coronavirus vaccine a year. Prime minister Narendra Modi boasts that India is now ‘pharmacy to the world’.
Adar, who is married to businesswoman, philanthropist and fashionista Natasha, attended the University of Westminster in London. He told the BBC this week: ‘The pressure on Serum Institute is unprecedented.
‘We’re being tugged at by different governments in the world, we need to support AstraZeneca for the countries that they need to supply vaccines to, and we’re being literally forced to supply as much product to the Indian government as well.’