A.V. Rama Rao's 70th Birthday Bash

When he married in 1962, Indian chemist and entrepreneur A. V. Rama Rao warned his wife, Hymavathi, that chemistry would always be his passion. "I am his second wife; chemistry is his first wife," she observes with a laugh.

This year is also the 10th year of operation of Avra Laboratories, the company that Rama Rao launched in August 1995 when he reached mandatory retirement age at Hyderabad's Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), a major government lab that he had headed since 1985.

Avra, which Rama Rao initially set up in a small shed with a corrugated roof, now employs 160 people and has become one of India's leading contract research organizations. The birthday bash coincided with the grand opening of Avra's expanded facilities, which feature a doubling of lab space and new capabilities to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients by the ton.

Among the luminaries speaking at the symposium earlier this month were 2001 chemistry Nobelist Barry K. Sharpless, 2002 chemistry Nobelist Koichi Tanaka, Cambridge University chemistry professors Ian Fleming and Steve Ley, and Oxford University professor S. G. Davies. Hundreds of IICT graduate students listened attentively to the high-caliber scientists, who don't drop by Hyderabad every week.

The keynote speaker on the second night was Yusuf K. Hamied, chairman and managing director of Mumbai-based pharmaceutical producer Cipla. Over the past 35 years, Rama Rao has supplied Hamied with numerous synthetic routes to pharmaceuticals including the antiviral AZT, the asthma drug salbutamol, and the anti-inflammatory ibuprofen.

"We both shared and continue to share the important concept that what is good for India is self-reliance and self-sufficiency," Hamied said. Cipla is most famous for offering to supply the triple AIDS drug cocktail to developing countries for less than $1.00 per day per patient.

Hamied captivated the audience just before dinner, keeping guests attentive despite their being attacked by mosquitoes. Hamied argued that India's pharmaceutical industry has prospered for the past 30 years because India had not, from 1971 until this year, recognized pharmaceutical patents. It is a mistake for India to now recognize these patents, Hamied argued emotionally, because it will only deny the needy access to affordable medicine. "One cannot have the same laws for 600 million people in the developed world and 3 billion people in the Third World," he said.

ANOTHER COMPANY head at the birthday bash was K. Ranga Raju, managing director and founder of Sai Life Sciences. Sai is a competing contract research company that is also located in Hyderabad and is similar in size to Avra. Raju told C&EN that his company's scientific adviser is one of Rama Rao's former Ph.D. students, J. Chandrasekhar, who was also there.

Other guests came from Europe and the U.S. at the invitation of Rama Rao's son Chandra. Chandra, 32, joined Avra two years ago as director of R&D. A Ph.D. chemist who studied under Fleming at Cambridge, Chandra spent six years in the U.K. before returning to Hyderabad with his New Zealander wife, Kim, who is also a Cambridge Ph.D. While in the U.K., Chandra earned a $550,000 grant from Syngenta and two other companies that allowed him to work with Avecia and AstraZeneca to develop a new catalyst that is now in commercial use. "He is doing a pretty good job as a follow-up to his father," Fleming commented.

The elder Rama Rao was born in 1935, the oldest of nine children in a middle-class family in the small city of Guntur. He obtained a bachelor's degree in his hometown before moving to Mumbai for his master's degree in chemistry. He earned his Ph.D. at the National Chemical Labs (NCL) in Pune while working at isolating 100 new compounds from natural sources.

In 1975, he went to Harvard University for two years of postdoctoral work in the synthesis of natural products in the research group headed by Nobelist E. J. Corey. One of the buildings at Avra today is named after Corey.

After returning to India, Rama Rao went back to research at NCL. In 1985, he moved to IICT and turned it into the respected organization it is today. His public-sector responsibilities included supervising Ph.D. students--a total of 109 between 1971 and 1995. One former student recalled Rama Rao telling him that his doctoral studies would proceed smoothly as long as he spent most of his waking hours in the lab.

Mandatory retirement from IICT put Rama Rao in a quandary. After discussion with his family, he launched Avra in 1995 so he could remain active in research and try his hand at being an entrepreneur. Through his network of professional contacts and former students, contracts from multinational companies came to him immediately. From merely conducting small-scale lab experiments, Avra rapidly expanded its capabilities into the manufacturing of products in kilogram quantities--and now ton quantities with the opening of the new facilities.

THE MAIN SERVICES provided by Avra are lead optimization, custom synthesis, and route selection. With the new facilities, Avra has 28 research labs. One of the new manufacturing plants is dedicated to producing the steroid that is the key ingredient in the abortion pill RU-486. The current Good Manufacturing Practices plant was built as a result of Rama Rao's concern about overpopulation in developing nations, but the product is facing intense price competition from China, Chandra says.

Several of Avra's foreign customers were among the guests at the birthday bash. One pointed out that the contract research business, because it involves intellectual property, is based on mutual trust. It is therefore reassuring to deal with people of established credentials like Rama Rao. Another customer told C&EN that his company picked Avra two years ago after a thorough selection process. The main factor in the end, he said, was that Avra's management is "easy to work with." This was proven after a pilot project worked out smoothly.

As extravagant as Rama Rao's 70th birthday celebration was, he has been holding similar events every five years for decades. Throughout the years, his family, colleagues, and subordinates have spent much time on the organization of these grand events. To their relief, Rama Rao announced that the event scheduled for 2010 would be his last major birthday bash.