Who is the Indian “prince of vaccines” that produces almost half the doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Its assets include Lincoln House, a mansion in Mumbai that once housed the US embassy in India. When it was bought in 2015 for $ 113 million, it was the most expensive house ever sold in India.

Punagwala, who studied at St Edmund’s School at Canterbury (with an annual enrollment of .000 30,000) and then at the University of Westminster, this week signed a deal to rent a mansion in Mayfair for a record amount of .000 50,000 a week. Covering 2,300 square meters, the property is 24 times the size of an average English house, connects to a neighboring hostel and provides access to one of Mayfair’s “secret gardens.” 40-year-old man is hired by a Polish billionaire Dominica Kulcic, who bought it last year for $ 57.57 million.

Punagala, who is married with two children, often travels by helicopter and private jet. He owns his paintings Picasso, Daly, Rembrandt and Rubens, as well as a collection of 35 rare luxury cars, with various Ferrari, Bentley και Rolls-Royceas well as a Mercedes S350 that has been turned into a copy Batmobile, Batman’s famous car!

His personal website reports on Punagwala’s “posh” lifestyle: “Easy to consider. rich and pampered... seeing him pose next to racehorses. “But, as noted, under this mask one hides “Serious young man trained by a difficult boss: his father, Cyrus Punaguala”.

The idea of ​​producing vaccines did not belong to the 40-year-old, but to his father, Cyrus, who founded the SII in 1966, when it was mainly dedicated to the breeding of racehorses. In addition, the first diphtheria and tetanus vaccines used filtered horse blood serum.

But Adar was the one who persuaded his father to open up more to the vaccine market after seeing a Bill Gates speech in 2015, in which the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft warned that the world was not prepared for a new viral pandemic. “I wanted to be prepared for a pandemic-level event since I heard Bill Gates in a Ted talk clearly say that we must be more anxious and prepared for such situations.” Punagwala told the Hindustan Times.

The Indian Demon has doubled the company’s production facilities and started producing more vaccines for developing countries on behalf of the World Health Organization and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), a charity founded by of which Puneguala is a member. Title “Prince of vaccines” Punagala acquired it when he replaced his father, the “king of vaccines,” as CEO of SII in 2011. The 40-year-old’s father is now president of the Poonawalla Group, which includes SII.

How the agreement with AstraZeneca was concluded

When the coronavirus pandemic broke out, Punagwala was faced with a dilemma: either he would do absolutely nothing and wait to see how things would turn out, or I would take the risk and he would become a pioneer. Choose the second. At the time, the institute was working with the University of Oxford to develop a new malaria vaccine, and the scientists asked it to work with Gilbert on the vaccine.

Last May, Punagwala met with the CEO of AstraZeneca, Pascal Sorio, in a videoconference and negotiated an agreement for SII to produce approx. One billion doses over 12 months, almost half of all doses.

That same month, a package arrived at the huge SII campus in Pune, 150 km southeast of Mumbai: it contained a vial packed in dry ice with the ingredients needed to make the Oxford vaccine and detailed instructions, but no clinical trial results demonstrating that the vaccine was effective and safe.

However, Punagala ordered three of his factories – which at the time produced “some very profitable vaccines” for other diseases – to immediately begin production of the Oxford / AstraZeneca AZD1222 coronavirus vaccine. “Nobody wants a pandemic, but we were almost designed for that” The 40-year-old told The Guardian earlier this year in an interview he gave from his office on the modified Airbus A320, which he described as “somewhat similar to Air Force One.”

“We produce 1.5 billion doses of vaccines every year. We never imagined that the whole world would be so dependent on us, but no other company has our own potential to increase their production.” emphasizes the 40-year-old. According to him, the decision to invest was easy because the company is a private company “and is not responsible to investors, bankers and shareholders”. As he points out, “it only took a five minute conversation between my father and me.” However, he is not afraid to admit that he was “A huge, huge risk”. “Many told me that I was crazy or stupid for taking such a big risk at the time.”

When the AstraZeneca vaccine finally received its first regulatory approval from the UK MHRA Authority in December 2020, IBS 40 million installments. The Serum Institute now produces 80 million doses per month and intends to soon increase its production to 100 million doses, although a fire that exploded in January in one of his units “returned” to the goals calendar. Punagala is now building a new $ 400 million plant that will operate in 2024 and it will produce one billion doses of vaccines per year.

Although 2024 seems distant for the needs of the current health crisis, the next pandemic is already on the mind of the “prince of vaccines”. As he characteristically told Bloomberg: “Maybe not in my life, but surely in the lives of my children we will have another global pandemic and I bet it will be much worse than that.”

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