SHOT AT SUCCESS

Adar Poonawalla is betting big that his family’s Serum Institute of India will be among the first to produce Covid-19 vaccines.

- MANU BALACHANDRAN AND NAAZNEEN KARMALI

When the coronavirus pandemic broke out earlier this year, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker by number of doses produced and sold, weighed the options: “Do absolutely nothing and watch how it unfolds, or take the risk and become a front-runner.”

The 39-year-old chose the latter and went on a dealmaking frenzy, which has put the privately held firm in the forefront of the global race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, he says in a telephone interview in late September from the company’s Pune headquarters, the latest of two interviews for this article. His father Cyrus Poonawalla, worth $11.5 billion, founded the Serum Institute in 1966 and remains its chairman. “It’s a huge personal risk I am taking,” says Poonawalla. The firm, he says, is investing $800 million to help find, and then produce a vaccine, and has already spent $300 million of that.

To beat the virus, Serum Institute has secured five partnerships over the past six months; the biggest is its deal with AstraZeneca. In June, the UK pharma giant licensed Serum Institute to manufacture a billion doses of a potential Covid-19 vaccine called AZD1222—with 400 million to be delivered this year. For comparison, Serum Institute’s annual output now is over 1.5 billion doses.