The First & The Fearless

Cipla’s YK Hamied is no ordinary business leader. He is a pioneer and a disruptor who has significantly changed the global pharma landscape in his over 50-year professional career.

- Salil Panchal

In 2000-01, the HIV/Aids threat had intensified across sub-Saharan Africa, affecting millions. To compound the problem, the medicines that could help treat the condition were prohibitively priced, making them unaffordable for the socio-economically under-privileged patients in the region. It was at this juncture that an idea changed their lives, the drug industry, and the shape of one Indian pharmaceutical company in particular.

Yusuf Khwaja Hamied—inspired by a chance read of a medical journal—decided to create a “triple cocktail” of drugs, at a fraction of their original price, which would help control and manage the disease. The product, called Triomune, comprised stavudine, lamivudine and nevirapine (three ingredients that were being manufactured and sold independently under different brand names by various drug companies). Triomune was manufactured by Cipla at its three plants—one each in Mumbai, Patalganga (in Raigad district, outside of Mumbai) and Bengaluru.

Hamied, then chairman of Cipla, offered this tablet to global nongovernmental organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) for distribution at $350 (Rs 15,750, with $1 equalling Rs 45) per patient per year, compared to $12,000 (Rs 540,000) per patient per year that the combination of the prevailing individual drugs cost in 2001. The global companies that manufactured these three drugs had no option but to reduce prices.

(Since then, other Indian companies have offered variants of the cocktail, at between $50 and $60 per patient per year. Cipla, however, does not manufacture Triomune anymore.)

“Hamied was completely fearless. When I first met Cipla officials, I was struck by the fact that they were not in awe of multinational pharma corporations,” recalls Leena Menghaney, South Asia head of MSF’s Access Campaign, who first met Hamied in 2005.