BUSINESS 0LD BUDDIES Cipla's Hamied (left) was among the many guests at the 70th birthday party for Rama Rao (right). maceutical industry has prospered for the past 30 years because India had not, from 1971 until this year, recognized pharmaceutical patents. It is a mistake for India to now recognize these patents, Hamied argued emotionally, because it will only deny the needy access to affordable medicine. "One cannot have the same laws for 600 million people in the developed world and 3 billion people in the Third World," he said.
A.V. RAMA RAO'S 70TH BIRTHDAY BASH Events included a symposium, a factory opening, and a speech protesting India's new patent regime JEAN-FRANCOIS TREMBLAY, C&EN HONG KONG
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HEN HE MARRIED IN I 9 6 2 ,
Indian chemist and entrepreneur A. V. Rama Rao warned his wife, Hymavathi, that chemistry would always be his passion. "I am his second wife; chemistry is his first wife," she observes with a laugh. Rama Rao could not think of a better way to spend his 70th birthday than to organize a three-day chemistry symposium with world-class scientists as speakers and to invite his friends, relatives, former colleagues, and even business competitors. This year is also the 10th year of operation of Avra Laboratories, the company that Rama Rao launched in August 1995 when he reached mandatory retirement age at Hyderabad's Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), a major government lab that he had headed since 1985. Avra, which Rama Rao initially set up in a small shed with a corrugated roof, now employs 160 people and has become one of India's leading contract research organizations. The birthday bash coincided with the grand opening of Avra's expanded facilities, which feature a doubling of lab space and new capabilities to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients by the ton. Among the luminaries speaking at the symposium earlier this month were 2001 chemistry Nobelist Barry K. Sharpless, WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
2002 chemistry Nobelist KoichiTanaka, Cambridge University chemistry professors Ian Fleming and Steve Ley and Oxford University professor S. G. Davies. Hundreds of I I C T graduate students listened attentively to the high-caliber scientists, who don't drop by Hyderabad every week. The keynote speaker on the second night was Yusuf K. Hamied, chairman and managing director of Mumbai-based pharmaceutical producer Cipla. Over the past 35 years, Rama Rao has supplied Hamied with numerous synthetic routes to pharmaceuticals including the antiviral AZT, the asthma drug salbutamol, and the anti-inflammatory ibuprofen. "We both shared and continue to share the important concept that what is good for India is self-reliance and self-sufficiency," Hamied said. Cipla is most famous for offering to supply the triple AIDS drug cocktail to developing countries for less than $1.00 per day per patient. Hamied captivated the audience just before dinner, keeping guests attentive despite their being attacked by mosquitoes. Hamied argued that India's phar-
ANOTHER COMPANY head at the birthday bash was K. Ranga Raju, managing director and founder of Sai Life Sciences. Sai is a competing contract research company that is also located in Hyderabad and is similar in size to Avra. Raju told C&EN that his company's scientific adviser is one of Rama Rao's former Ph.D. students, J. Chandrasekhar, who was also there. Other guests came from Europe and the U.S. at the invitation of Rama Rao's son Chandra. Chandra, 32, joined Avra two years ago as director of R&D. A Ph.D. chemist who studied under Fleming at Cambridge, Chandra spent six years in the U.K. before returning to Hyderabad with his New Zealander wife, Kim, who is also a Cambridge Ph.D. While in the U.K., Chandra earned a $550,000 grant from Syngenta and two other companies that allowed him to work with Avecia and AstraZeneca to develop a new catalyst that is now in commercial use. "He is doing a pretty good job as a follow-up to his father," Fleming commented. The elder Rama Rao was born in 1935, the oldest of nine children in a middle-class family in the small city of Guntur. H e obtained a bachelor's degree in his hometown before moving to Mumbai for his master's degree in chemistry. H e earned his Ph.D. at the National Chemical Labs (NCL) in Pune while working at isolating 100 new compounds from natural sources. In 1975, he went to Harvard University for two years of postdoctoral work in the synthesis of natural products in the research group headed by Nobelist E. J. Corey One of the buildings at Avra today is named after Corey
"One cannot have the same laws for 600 million people in the developed world and 3 billion people in the third world."
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