The Long Shot

Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the 4,837 crore by revenue Serum Institute of India, is looking to grow the low cost, high volume vaccine-maker to 10,000 crore by 2022

- Varsha Meghani

In 1996, a quarter of a million children were deafened, disabled and many of them killed by the meningitis-A virus that swept through Africa’s sub-Saharan belt. Every year thousands of children in the 25 countries stretching from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east would get infected, but when the scourge hit its peak, national health ministers scrambled to find a solution. But at around $140 a dose, the vaccines retailed by Big Pharma were exorbitant.

That’s when the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) intervened. An international charity that promotes improved access to vaccines, GAVI partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Seattle-based not for-profit Path to design a vaccine for Africa—targeting the precise strain of disease while still being affordable. They roped in the Serum Institute of India (SII) to undertake the manufacturing and after four years of research, development and clinical trials in the mid-2000s, the vaccine—dubbed MenAfriVac and costing less than 50 cents a dose—was rolled out in 2010. Today, the meningitis-A virus has been all but wiped out of the vaccinated areas of the sub-Saharan belt.

“[SII’s] contribution to global health has been phenomenal,” noted Microsoft founder Bill Gates, during his visit to the vaccine-maker’s headquarters in Pune in 2012. (His foundation funds GAVI.) Founded by Cyrus Poonawalla in 1966, SII is the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world by number of doses produced. The privately-owned company claims to provide 1.3 billion shots every year to over 140 mostly low-and-middle-income countries.