THE VACCINE PRINCE BETS ON A SECOND CHANCE
ADAR POONAWALLA IS NO STRANGER TO GAMBLES. He owes his multibillion-dollar empire to a series of big bets that paid off handsomely. Cyrus Poonawalla, his father, made his own fortune on horses—and then multiplied it by making another bet in 1966: that he could make more money producing vaccines than he could on horse breeding and racing. He formed the Serum Institute of India (SII), which grew slowly for three decades, selling antivenoms and lifesaving vaccines for India.
When Adar, then just 21, joined the company in 2001, he persuaded his father to dramatically ramp up production—wagering that they could fill a gap in global supply by making low-cost vaccines in very large quantities. By 2017, SII was the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer.
In early 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading rapidly around the world, Adar Poonawalla gambled yet again, this time on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca. In September 2020, his company, based in the western Indian city of Pune, started manufacturing millions of doses months before the
