With Indian pharma companies willing to cash out, is Glenn Saldanha India’s best bet for a home-grown drug?
Glenn Saldanha looks like a man at peace. The turmoil within the pharmaceutical industry — pipelines running dry, mergers and acquisitions in the hope of new discovery and an emerging question mark on investing in innovation — seems distant for the managing director and CEO of Glenmark Pharmaceuticals.
At 41, he is pretty much in control of the task he set out to do a decade ago: Turning Glenmark into a multinational company that makes innovative drugs, and not just the generic drugs it has been developing for 23 years.
In an assertion of the belief that the company needs to innovate, French pharma company Sanofi paid $50 million to Glenmark in July. This was an upfront payment in the $613 million out-licensing deal that Saldanha had sealed with Sanofi in May. The rest of the money will come in milestone payments if and when the molecule GBR 500 crosses various clinical stages. The first phase of clinical trials for the molecule has been completed.
Initially, the focus was on small molecules (traditional synthetic drugs) for respiratory and metabolic diseases. But, by 2004, he was bitten by the biologics bug and went in search of government sops for setting up a new centre.
Saldanha understood that being late in the game even with best-in-class drugs was risky and that metabolic diseases were a dicey area to be in, especially with the US Food and Drug Administration slapping newer, bigger studies for drug approval. He exited both.
(This story appears in the 23 September, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)