Learnings & Misgivings

The Advinus Decade: Inside the Tata Group’s expensive drug discovery flameout

Born 2005. Died 2017. Several hundred crores poorer, the Tata Group has finally pulled the plug on its ambitious drug discovery venture. What went wrong?

14/08/17

Seema Singh

No one has come out of this venture looking great—not Rashmi Barbhaiya, who resigned and returned to the US, and not the TATAs who shut down the Pune unit and laid off people

Both sides had good intentions, resources, and credentials but they couldn’t pull it off. Did the scaled-down big pharma model fail or did people run out of patience?

 

Three years ago, the Piramals shut down the drug discovery unit. Every time such a closure happens, it sends a shiver down the small community’s spine. Why even do such a risky venture in India?

 

Aarin Capital’s Ranjan Pai thinks too much money is chasing e-commerce in India and everyone would be better off if that money came into biotech. Will the exit he is looking for provide a proof that it’s worth doing it in India?

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A decade is a long enough time in any business, however risky its premise or exploratory its process, to prove whether it’ll return value to its investors or not. This was evident last month when the news broke that the Tata group was selling Advinus Therapeutics to Eurofins Scientific, a contract research and manufacturing company…

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