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?

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?

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 in Luxembourg. What seemed like a masterful strategy 10 years ago, to get into a new business of discovering drugs and licensing out to big pharma, ended up in a messy exit.

No one has come out of this decadal quest looking great.

AUTHOR

Seema Singh

Seema has over two decades of experience in journalism. Before starting The Ken, Seema wrote “Myth Breaker: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and the Story of Indian Biotech”, published by HarperCollins in May 2016. Prior to that, she was a senior editor and bureau chief for Bangalore with Forbes India, and before that she wrote for Mint. Seema has written for numerous international publications like IEEE-Spectrum, New Scientist, Cell and Newsweek. Seema is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a MacArthur Foundation Research Grantee.

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