Indian Brewer Turned Biotech Queen

Biocon, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw's creation, hopes to improve the odds of drug discovery

by Shailaja Neelakantan

Indian liquor manufacturers who scorned Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw’s skills as a brew master never expected her to become one of India’s richest women with a net worth of some $350 million. In 1978 she had just $200 to start Biocon in her garage in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. Now Biocon has a market capitalization of $500 to $700 million on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

After a chance encounter with an Irish entrepreneur, Mazumdar-Shaw formed Biocon India as a joint venture with the intial goal of developing enzymes for the beer industry, an industry that Mazumdar-Shaw—the daughter of the creator of India’s flagship Kingfisher beer—already understood. Starting with an enzyme from papaya that prevented chilled beer from turning cloudy, Biocon was soon developing enzymes for industries ranging from fruit juices to textiles.
Even with her enzyme business booming, Mazumdar-Shaw decided to expand. Through 2000 and into 2001, she started making active ingredients for bulk-drug manufacturers, such as the statins used in cholesterol busters. Biocon’s patented process produces statins that are less expensive than chemical versions, making them an attractive buy for many generic-drug manufacturers in the United States and Europe.

In 2002 Biocon began using a yeast expression system called Pichia, which it had licensed to develop an alternative process for making insulin. The result was Insugen—Biocon’s first foray into branded biotech formulations—which it launched in 2004. This product made Biocon the first Indian company to make insulin using its own proprietary technology, and now this insulin is the world’s fourth-best seller.
That same year Biocon went public, becoming only the second Indian company to exceed a market capitalization of $1 billion on the first day of its listing.

Dubbed India’s “Biotech Queen” by the local press, Mazumdar-Shaw has also turned out to be the queen of reinvention. In 2006 Biocon acquired a proprietary technology platform for oral peptides from Nobex in North Carolina. This acquisition marked the initiation of Biocon’s oral insulin program. Then in a surprise move, Mazumdar-Shaw sold Biocon’s enzymes business to Novozymes for $115 million in June 2007. The reason: She wanted to focus on research and development of “novel and affordable” biopharmaceuticals, as well as biogenerics, the latter being harder to make than chemical generics. “We knew that going forward, [biopharmaceuticals] would contribute more to us. It was an emotional decision to let go of enzymes,” says Mazumdar-Shaw.

Although drug discovery is a costly and uncertain business, Mazumdar-Shaw believes that by carrying out most of the early development work in India and taking on only the most-promising candidates for further research, the company substantially reduces its risk. “We have a strategy and a model for affordable drug development that allows us to take calculated risks,” she says. And she’s confident that her model will reduce the costs associated with those risks. That could mean the fulfillment of her cherished dream—developing a proprietary oral form of insulin.