About this episode

The episode features a discussion with two prominent figures in Indian pharma about the complexities of drug development and the industry's landscape.

I got two of the biggest names in Indian pharma into one room, Rajeev Juneja of Mankind and GV Prasad of Dr. Reddy's, who'd somehow never actually met before this, and what came out was part masterclass and part origin story, from why being relentlessly contrarian beat following the herd, to how a college dropout from Meerut turned everything he hated about a medical store into a pharma giant, to why a chemical engineer who says he owes his career to his marriage spent decades chasing one original molecule, and somewhere in between we got into why India makes the world's generics instead of discovering its own drugs, what it really takes in time and money to bring a single drug to market, why GV thinks the AI-will-cure-everything story is overstated, where GLP-1s go next, and the one thing they'd tell a 25-year-old trying to build in pharma. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 04:27 Rajeev Juneja's path from medical-store apprentice to building Mankind 10:11 Mankind's contrarian OTC and bottom-up market strategy 16:23 G.V. Prasad on science and the Dr. Reddy's lineage 23:06 Segmenting the industry and how generic drugs are made 29:15 Why drug purity standards are shared but…

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