Knockoff Original

Thwarted in her ambition to become a brewmaster, KIRAN MAZUMDAR-SHAW channeled her frustrations into building an international copycat-drug powerhouse and has become one of the world's most successful—and richest—female entrepreneurs.

- By Amy Feldman

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw's booming drug business started not in a laboratory but in a tin-roofed shed in Bengaluru, the city formerly known as Bangalore and the capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Inside, the 25-year-old was using the knowledge she had learned studying beer brewing in Australia to ferment enzymes for customers like Ocean Spray cranberry juice. Originally, she had wanted to be like her father, who was the head brewmaster at United Breweries, the big Indian firm now owned by Heineken and famous for its Kingfisher beer. But it was 1978, and she couldn't find a job. No one wanted to hire a woman as a brewer.

Distraught and disillusioned, Mazumdar-Shaw put her education to another use: making enzymes for industrial uses. In partnership with an Irish entrepreneur who owned a company called Biocon and was looking to expand to India, she set up shop inside that hot shed. “I call myself an accidental entrepreneur,” she says.

The business became successful enough that Unilever bought it in the 1980s along with its Irish parent. Mazumdar-Shaw stayed on to run the unit from Bengaluru until 1998, when she and her late husband, John Shaw, bought back Unilever’s stake for about $2 million. It was a steal: She would eventually sell the enzymes business to Denmark’s Novozymes for $115 million in 2007.

By then she had bigger things in mind. In 2000, Biocon began brewing up pharmaceuticals, starting with insulin. Insulin is a type of “biologic,” or a drug derived from a living source, traditionally a modified version of E. coli bacteria in insulin’s case (Biocon uses yeast). The company’s India base enabled it to make these biologics cheaper than big Western pharma outfits.