DR YUSUF HAMIED is not being morbid but the 86-year-old chairman of Cipla, which is among the top 50 pharmaceutical companies in the world, pondered that on his demise, he would quite like lines from Longfellow’s 1838 poem, The Psalm of Life, inscribed on his tombstone.
It is his favourite poem which he learnt from his father when he was a child growing up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and can still recite word perfect.
That is perhaps because of Hamied’s guiding philosophy: he has pursued the two objectives dearest to his heart.
“Health and education,” he told GG2 Power List.
“Over the years, my mission has been to provide access to quality, affordable drugs for all and that none should be denied medication,” he declared.
The pharma sector, including companies like Cipla, have improved health in India.
“At independence in 1947, average life expectancy in India was 27 years,” Hamied observed. “It’s now in the late sixties. In those early days, there were a lot of deaths, especially in rural areas, at childbirth and between the ages of zero and five.”
And in Africa, Hamied’s “dollar a day” cocktail of drugs has saved millions of lives.
Hamied’s life has been inextricably bound up with Cambridge, especially with Christ’s College, where he was a student between 1954-1960 and frequented the chemistry labs in Lensfield Road. It was here he did his degree in chemistry followed by a PhD under the Nobel Laureate (later Lord) Alexander Todd. After his studies, he returned home to join Cipla, starting at the bottom. It was a company (Chemical, Industrial & Pharmaceutical Laboratories) his father, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, had set up in 1935. In 1939 Cipla received a visit from Mahatma Gandhi who wanted India to become more self-reliant in medicine and do more for the Allied war effort.
In May, a new building called “Yusuf Hamied Court” will be formally inaugurated at Christ’s, which already has an auditorium in the Yusuf Hamied Centre plus residences for students called Hamied House, Hamied Lodge and Hamied Hall.
He does not mind being generous with Cambridge. He has also helped leading British scientists to visit India via either the Royal Society or the Royal Society of Chemistry or directly from Cambridge University. And during return visits, Indian scholars have spent time in Cambridge. He would now like Cambridge University actually to have a presence in India rather in the way that the Harvard Business School does.
Cambridge is “the institution that has helped to educate me,” he said. “I am where I am because of Cambridge. The education I got at Cambridge has led to whatever success I have had in life.”
Hamied has given a “transformative donation” (words of the former vice chancellor Stephen Toope) to the chemistry department at Cambridge, which has been renamed the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. The new name stays until 2050.
And the “1702 chair of chemistry”, the oldest in academia, is now the “Yusuf Hamied 1702 chair of chemistry”.
He wants to ensure that whatever advances are made in the chemistry department, which is recognised as being among the best in the world, benefits all humanity.
He said that the “Yusuf Hamied chemistry fund”, which runs into perpetuity, “will be used for postdocs, bursaries to students, researchers, all for furthering chemistry.
“Cutting edge science is being done by people like Shankar (Balasubramanian) in medicinal chemistry in which I’m interested – biotechnology, gene therapy, immunotherapy, particularly in cancer.”
The idea is not simply to prolong life, said Hamied, but to prolong the “productive quality of life”.
“This incorporates treatment of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer and cancer,” he went on.
He said: “There are antibiotics developed by fermentation – like penicillin. Then there are drugs developed by biotechnology, and from RNA and DNA. There’s a whole host of different technologies that have developed in the last few decades. And if you are in pharmaceuticals, you have to keep abreast of the newer developments. Otherwise, you’re left behind.
“Essentially, we (Cipla) are a generic company which means manufacturing drugs that are off patent. But at the same time, we are partnering with some international companies that have got an edge over us in the latest technologies. We’ve taken a 10 per cent share in a German company, in Munich, working in RNA. And we have invested in a company in India, jointly with Kemwell Pharma, to manufacture newer treatments for asthma and respiratory diseases.”
In Spain, between Malaga and Marbella, where he has a home, he has set up the Yusuf Hamied Centre, headquarters of the Cudeca Institute of Studies and Research in Palliative Care. The centre is located next to the Cudeca Foundation’s Palliative Care Centre and will train social and healthcare professionals to improve the quality of palliative care. The centre has three floors of facilities dedicated to training and research in palliative care.
“The institute is for advanced nursing,” said Hamied. “If you have people who are dying, they need special care. When the doctors and hospitals give up, what happens to those patients in need of palliative care?
“And palliative care doesn’t only mean cancer. You can have somebody who has had a stroke, and can’t walk, can’t move, can’t speak, can’t eat properly. In the twilight years of your life, you want some quality of life. So if I can I help with that….
“The other thing I’ve recently taken an interest in is rare orphan disease. There’s one called Menkes syndrome (a disorder that affects copper levels in the body). We saved a boy’s life by manufacturing the drugs he required in India. It wasn’t available anywhere else.
“We did it in 1986 with an orphan disease called Thalassaemia which is also prevalent in India. The blood in a person’s body keeps changing, reproducing itself over time but the Thalassaemia means you’re not producing the blood. So every two or three weeks, a Thalassaemic child has to be given a blood transfusion. That results in an accumulation of iron in the body. And with that, the span of life is shortened. And Cipla developed the first drug to be given orally to remove iron from the body.
“So it means as science keeps changing and improving, you can’t live in the past. In India, they’re talking of ayurvedic treatment which is 2,000 years old. I’m not saying that some of those medicines are not good. But you have to live in the future. You can apply modern medicine to improve the science behind ayurveda.”
As for being on the Asian Power List and what he leaves behind – “Dust thou art, to dust returnest” – Hamied finds meaning in Longfellow: “Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime,/And, departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time.”
