The man who made cancer drugs affordable and made millions

Rebels come in many forms. Not everyone looks like a jholawalla or Che Guevara. There is one that wears a bow tie and lives in Mumbai. His critics call him a 'pirate.'

Big Pharma accuses him of exploiting others' 'intellectual property' to swell his own coffers, undermining investment in drugs of the future. Millions around the world, however, see him as a fighter for a worthy cause. At 77, Dr Yusuf Khwaja Hamied, generic drugs boss and chairman of CIPLA Ltd, is still in battle mode.

Last week, he struck again. CIPLA, the company Hamied heads, announced it was slashing prices of its cancer drugs by as much as 75% in India. The company makes a generic version of Nexavar, a brand name cancer drug, used to treat certain types of kidney and liver cancer. Earlier, it sold it for Rs28,000 for a monthly dose. Now, CIPLA says it will sell the same at Rs6,840, cheaper than even the price offered by NATCO, another Indian generic drugmaker. The original branded drug costs Rs 2.84 lakh a month.

Hamied, the champion of affordable medicine, does not fit the standard template of 'saviour.' He loves chemistry. He also loves race horses and collecting art. He is as much at home in Mumbai as in Marabella, Mauritius and  London. Needless to say he is rich - among Forbes' list of billionaires.

Given the price of cancer drugs, it is not surprising that patients and health activists have reacted to CIPLA's latest move with whoops of  joy. Analysts say a price war is in the offing.

Hamied makes clear that though he believes in humanitarianism, he is not into charity. "We are cutting prices. We are being humanitarian. But we are not doing charity. Doctors in India link the quality of drugs to the price of drugs. We want to remove that misconception," he told a financial daily.

Few who have been following the Hamied story are surprised. His latest move brings to mind the masterly strategy that turned CIPLA into the largest supplier of antiretroviral drugs in the world.

Who is Yusuf Hamied, and how did he make his millions while saving lives?

"He manufactures perfect copies of many of the world's best and most important medicines and sells them at a snip. Dr Hamied and his family are certainly very rich but many poor people owe him their health, without which they would be destitute indeed," wrote The Guardian's Sarah Boseley in 2003.

Yusuf Hamied was born in 1936 in Vilnius, Lithuania. His father was a Muslim and his mother Jewish.

Yusuf Hamied's father, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, who was equally passionate about chemistry,  set up Chemical Industrial and Pharmaceutical Laboratories, or CIPLA, in 1935. Hamied Senior was inspired by Gandhi and the freedom struggle. During the Second World War, as demand for medicines from the Indian army surged, and supplies from Europe's drug-makers collapsed, it was Cipla that provided quinine to treat malaria and injections for dysentery.

Hamied is truly his father's son.  His first brush with international glory came with the onset of the AIDS epidemic.

In the early 1990s, a few years after India had reported its first case of AIDS, the Indian Council on Medical Research asked him if he could make a version of Glaxo Wellcome's AZT, the first Aids medicine. Within two years, CIPLA came up with a product that cost one-fifth of the price of the brand-name drug. But few Indians could afford the drug even at that cost. Sadly, the government was more focused on prevention than treatment at that time.  It did not make much business sense for Hamied to persist making the drug.

In 2001, Hamied shook up the global pharma industry by  offering Medecin Sans Frontieres, an international medical and humanitarian organisation, a drug cocktail to fight AIDS for  about a dollar per day per patient. This was about 5% of the cost of similar drugs sold by global pharmaceutical giants.

The offer changed the face of AIDS treatment. Big pharmaceutical companies were compelled to slash the price of their AIDS drugs.

What is Hamied's secret? He has the passion, he has the PhD. But more than anything else, it is a canny sense of how to break new ground and make money in the process that lies at the core of this rebel with the riches.

The author is a writer based
in New Delhi