In today’s Finshots, we talk about India’s first homegrown drug and why it took Indian pharma so long to get here.

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Now, onto today’s story.

The Story

India is often called the “pharmacy of the world”.

And there’s a good reason for that. If you’ve ever popped a paracetamol, taken a life-saving antibiotic, or received a vaccine, there’s a chance it was manufactured by an Indian company.

Take a look at what happened when the Novo Nordisk patent for semaglutide expired. Within days, there were at least 15 generics. Generics are simply cheaper versions of the same medicine, made after patent protection expires. And almost nobody else in the world can make them like we do.

For context, today India supplies medicines to over 200 countries, accounts for roughly 20% of the world’s generic medicines, and produces more than 60% of the world’s vaccines.

Which is what makes the next part of this story so surprising.

For all our expertise in making medicines, we’ve rarely been the ones inventing them.

Think about it. India is home to thousands of pharmaceutical companies, some of the world’s largest drug manufacturers, and a talent pool that powers research labs across the globe. Yet very few drugs are discovered and developed entirely in India.

But a few days ago, Wockhardt, a Mumbai-based pharma company, became an exception by doing something very few Indian drugmakers have done: developing Zaynich, a homegrown antibiotic, and earning global recognition for it.

Side bar: Indian companies have developed homegrown drugs before Wockhardt. But most stayed largely India-focused and never turned into major global success stories. Take Zydus’ Saroglitazar, approved in India in 2013. It’s often described as the first NCE (New Chemical Entity or essentially a brand-new active ingredient never approved for human use before) discovered and developed by an Indian company to reach the market. But despite the milestone, it remained largely a domestic story rather than becoming a global blockbuster.

Which makes you ask, “Why did a country that became exceptionally good at manufacturing medicines take so long to create one of its own?”

The answer lies in a decades-old decision that helped build India’s pharmaceutical industry into a global powerhouse. But that same decision may have also made drug discovery one of the hardest bets an Indian company could make.

To understand why, we need to go back to 1970 with the Indian Patent Act.

At the time, foreign pharmaceutical companies dominated India’s drug market and medicines were often too expensive for ordinary Indians. So the government introduced a new patent regime that recognised process patents for medicines.

In simple terms, if an Indian company could figure out how to reverse engineer and manufacture a drug, it could legally produce and sell it even if the original molecule had been discovered elsewhere.

The policy worked amazingly well. Indian drugmakers didn’t need to spend billions discovering new molecules when manufacturing proven ones was faster, cheaper and far less risky. That also meant medicines became more affordable, nurtured domestic drugmakers, and eventually turned India into the world’s generic-drug powerhouse.

If you think about it, this also indirectly gave companies less reason to take on the harder challenge of developing their own drugs. In a way, India’s pharmaceutical industry became too successful for its own good. For decades, Indian drugmakers could simply take a medicine discovered elsewhere, manufacture it at scale, sell it at a fraction of the cost, and still make healthy profits.

Drug discovery on the other hand, was a harder pitch to sell to the board and investors.

Every rupee they would spend on it is a rupee not spent expanding labs, making new generics or making the current business stronger. In other words, companies must fund innovation by sacrificing profits from the very model that made them successful in the first place.

And that's a difficult trade-off. A generic drug can start generating revenue within a few years. But the same can’t be said for a new molecule. And that’s what makes Wockhardt’s breakthrough so interesting.

Inventing a new drug today is a little like buying lottery tickets that cost millions of dollars each. Most never amount to anything. Even the winning ones can take over a decade to pay off. On average, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars and 10–15 years bringing a single drug to market, and most still fail.

And Wockhardt had that stubbornness. For over 27 years, a team of scientists in Mumbai quietly worked on something the rest of the industry had largely given up on: discovering new antibiotics.

Their target was antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. It’s what happens when bacteria evolve to outsmart the drugs meant to kill them. Bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.2 million deaths globally in 2019, and contributed to nearly 5 million more.

And yet, globally, new antibiotic development has nearly come to a full stop. The financial incentives simply aren’t there. Most large pharmaceutical companies have exited antibiotic research entirely.

Despite that, Wockhardt kept going anyway.

Back in November 2024, they launched Nafithromycin (marketed as Miqnaf), which became India’s first indigenously discovered antibiotic in over three decades. Developed with support from Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), Nafithromycin targets bacterial pneumonia caused by drug-resistant bacteria. For doctors, the appeal was simple. A treatment that worked faster, required fewer doses and could help fight bacteria that were becoming increasingly resistant to existing drugs.

But Nafithromycin was only the beginning.

The bigger story is of Zaynich. Built to tackle some of the world’s most dangerous drug-resistant infections, Zaynich goes after the very bacteria that have learned how to survive our best antibiotics.

In clinical trials, the drug demonstrated remarkably high efficacy against pathogens that have become increasingly difficult to treat with existing antibiotics.

And this wasn’t some niche scientific curiosity.

Zaynich achieved a staggering 96.8% efficacy rate in Phase 3 trials and quickly caught the attention of regulators in both the US and Europe. In fact, Wockhardt became the first Indian pharmaceutical company to seek US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval for a drug discovered and developed entirely in India.

Wockhardt expects no competition for this drug worldwide for at least the next 15 years, as there is no similar drug in research pipelines anywhere. Because while India has a world class ecosystem for making medicines, not many companies want to cannibalise it for a risky breakthrough.

But Wockhardt did and it kept reinvesting its profits into making this homegrown drug. That’s what makes Zaynich so remarkable. It proves today that not only can we make the world’s medicines, but also invent them.

And the opportunity ahead is huge. Right now, India has captured just 3% of the world’s pharma market by value. And with more homegrown drugs, we could capture more value, whereas the volume already sits in our favour.

Besides, things may have also started to change as pharma giants like Sun Pharma and Glenmark are already exploring how AI can speed up parts of the drug discovery process and reduce the chances of costly failures.

If these technologies can lower the time, cost and risk, the next Indian pharma giant may not have to spend another 27 years proving what Indian pharma is capable of.

Until then…

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