Yusuf Hamied
| Yusuf Hamied | |
|---|---|
| Born |
25 July 1936 Wilno, Wilno Voivodeship, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) |
| Citizenship | Indian |
| Institutions | Cipla |
| Alma mater | Christ's College, Cambridge |
| Thesis | Chemistry of the aphins (1961) |
| Notable awards | Padma Bhushan |
Yusuf Khwaja Hamied (born 25 July 1936) is a billionaire Indian scientist and businessman, the chairman of Cipla, a generic pharmaceuticals company founded by his father Khwaja Abdul Hamied in 1935.
Hamied was raised in Bombay. His Indian Muslim father and Russophone Jewish mother met in pre-war Berlin, where they were graduate students. Hamied was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay. He holds a PhD in chemistry from Christ's College, Cambridge. He uses his chemistry notebooks from Cambridge when he develops new syntheses of drugs.
Hamied is best known outside India for defying large Western pharmaceutical companies in order to provide generic AIDS drugs and treatments for other ailments primarily affecting people in poor countries. Hamied has led efforts to eradicate AIDS in the developing world and to give patients life-saving medicines regardless of their ability to pay, and has been characterized as a modern-day Robin Hood figure as a result.
Hamied stated, "I don't want to make money off these diseases which cause the whole fabric of society to crumble".
In September 2011, in a piece about how he was trying to radically lower costs of biotech drugs for cancer, diabetes and other noncommunicable diseases, The New York Times wrote of Hamied:
Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, chairman of the Indian drug giant Cipla Ltd., electrified the global health community a decade ago when he said he could produce cocktails of AIDS medicines for $1 per day — a fraction of the price charged by branded pharmaceutical companies. That price has since fallen to 20 cents per day, and more than six million people in the developing world now receive treatment, up from little more than 2,000 in 2001.
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