Cyrus Poonawalla and Family

Serum Institute produces more vaccines than any organisation on earth. It started with a mission nobody thought was commercially viable.

Cyrus Poonawalla founded the Serum Institute of India in 1966 with a mission that was unfashionable at the time: manufacturing vaccines at a price that governments in developing countries could afford. The logic was that high-volume, low-margin production for public health programmes was a viable and socially necessary business if run with sufficient manufacturing discipline. Serum Institute grew over the following decades into the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, producing over 1.5 billion doses annually of vaccines for polio, measles, influenza and other diseases, supplied predominantly to immunisation programmes across Asia and Africa (as stated by Serum Institute of India).

Adar Poonawalla, who leads the company now, extended that model to COVID-19. Serum Institute produced the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine under licence and supplied several billion doses to India and lower-income countries at prices that larger Western manufacturers were not offering. The scale of that effort drew global attention to a company that had been operating quietly and consequentially for decades before the pandemic made its work visible.