Why India Has So Few Drug Discovery Startups | Vyome CEO Venkat Nelabhotla

India supplies a fifth of the world's medicines and invents almost none of them. Venkat Nelabhotla spent three decades inside that industry before co-founding Vyome, and here he explains where drug discovery in India stalls, and why he took a rare disease drug to the Nasdaq instead.

Few operators have run a shampoo brand, a vaccine company and a Nasdaq listed biotech. Venkat Nelabhotla took CavinKare from 21 crores to 200 crores, launched India's first recombinant hepatitis B vaccine at Shantha Biotechnics at 300 rupees against the multinationals' 800, and ran Emami as CEO while its market cap went from 200 million dollars to 1.5 billion. Then he co-founded Vyome with a Harvard professor and went after malignant fungating wounds, the open lesions advanced cancer leaves on the skin, for which no FDA approved drug exists anywhere.

Speaking with host Akshay Datt, he lays out the rare disease drug development strategy behind a phase two trial that ran on just 15 patients, and his own index of drug discovery in India: if America is 100, China is 40 and India is two or three. It arrives as US tariffs push the Indian pharma industry to think past generics.

👉How Venkat priced India's first hepatitis B vaccine at 300 rupees against GSK and Sanofi at 800, and won volume by running mass vaccination camps instead of fighting for South Mumbai clinics

👉Why Vyome deliberately started with Indian dermatology products as low hanging fruit, and only pivoted to US drug development after a 2 billion dollar biotech fund led its Series C

👉What a malignant fungating wound actually is, why zero FDA approved therapies exist for its symptoms, and how a phase two study in 15 patients produced statistically significant data

👉Break down the orphan drug designation stack, roughly 3 to 4 million dollars in approval fee waivers, seven years of market exclusivity beyond patents, and tax credits on US clinical trial spend

👉Why Venkat rates drug discovery in India at two or three against 100 for America and 40 for China, and the biotech sovereign zone with free capital movement and 15 year talent visas he thinks would fix it

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