Bangalore: Tucked into a quiet residential area of south Bangalore is the office of Nadathur Holdings and Investments Pvt. Ltd (NHIL), a company that is seeking to revolutionize the drug discovery process, and the business of pharmaceuticals.
“We want to re-engineer the monstrosity called drug discovery and disprove that it takes as much as $800 million-1 billion (Rs3,224-4,030 crore) to develop a drug,” says Sriram Nadathur, director, NHIL.
Over the seven years that it has been in existence, NHIL, a mixture of a venture capital firm, a private equity firm and an angel fund, has invested around $1 billion in 25 companies. However, it is its Lifespring Ventures initiative that makes NHIL different from other venture capital firms.
Lifespring Ventures is a subsidiary of NHIL that has been incorporated as a partnership firm. It owns five start-ups, one each in every stage of the drug discovery process. Lifespring Ventures has committed an investment of Rs250 crore to these five companies that it is incubating.
The five work as stand-alone companies that already generate revenue from sales or will do so in coming months; together, they make up an entire drug discovery ecosystem.
NHIL was founded by one of Infosys Technologies Ltd’s founders, Raghavan S. Nadathur (Sriram Nadathur’s father). Sriram Nadathur and others involved in NHIL have been reticent about NHIL’s holdings—for instance, the fact that the company has invested $1 billion isn’t widely known, and its plans for the life-sciences space. Now, it emerges that NHIL has a grand plan for the business, one that changes the way drugs are discovered currently.
The cogs in the wheel
Lifespring Ventures has a stated focus on metabolic syndrome, which increases a person’s chance of developing heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Full circle: Lifespring founders Sriram Nadathur, Suri Venkatachalam and Manish Gupta. (Gopinath Nair / Mint)
Basic research in the Lifespring Ventures family is driven by Connexios Life Sciences Pvt. Ltd, a drug discovery company looking for new molecules for drugs as well as repositioning old molecules for newer conditions. Connexios also has a programme where markers—biochemical parameters associated with specific disease states—are used for diagnostic and prognostic purposes.
Abexome Biosciences Pvt. Ltd is the company responsible for markers. It will use markers that come about from Connexios’ research to develop key diagnostic solutions as well as kits. Besides metabolic syndrome, Abexome is focused on oncology (cancer) and reproductive endocrinology (largely to do with hormones).