Lupin's Unsexy Bet

摘要

As a young scientist in what was then Bombay and is now called Mumbai, Desh Bandhu Gupta got frustrated by all the discoveries he couldn't pursue working for a British pharmaceutical company that is now part of Sanofi-Aventis. So he quit, borrowed $120 from his wife and bought a tiny Indian vitamin company called Lupin to be the vehicle of his dreams. "I had a lot of ideas," he says. Among them were ways to check the contagions that cut short millions of lives in his native India. Thirty-six years later Lupin is the sixth-largest drug company in a pharmaceuticals-minded nation and has world leadership in the treatment of tuberculosis, an unsexy disease most drug companies have ignored but India cannot. Gupta and his family own 52% of the company.