Mumbai, March 15: Kalam Anji Reddy, one of the doyens of India’s pharmaceutical industry, passed away this evening at a hospital in Hyderabad. The founder and chairman of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories was 73. He is survived by wife Samrajyam, daughter Anuradha and son K. Satish Reddy.

Reddy, the son of a turmeric farmer, got his PhD in chemical engineering from the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune. He then joined the state-owned IDPL before forming his own pharmaceutical company in 1984 with an initial capital outlay of Rs 25 lakh.

One of the first products it came out with was an active pharmaceutical ingredient — Methyldopa, a hypertension drug. The company ventured into formulations in 1987. Its first big product came in 1991 when DRL launched Omez. Omez went on to became its first Rs-100-crore brand.

The eponymous company became a trailblazer among domestic pharma companies and was one of the first to start basic drug discovery research in 1993 — an area dominated by multinational companies.

While Dr Anji Reddy initially took up diabetes research, he believed Indian companies stood a good chance in the innovation game despite their small size and lower resource spend vis-à-vis the MNC giants.

He often quoted the examples of successful Japanese companies that had outlicensed several of their molecules and he had maintained that size should not be a constraint for domestic pharmaceutical entities to be successful in the field of research.

In 1993, Dr. Reddy’s Research Foundation (DRF) was established. It was the first to start work on drug discovery programmes in the country. These efforts bore fruit in 1997 when DRF discovered Balaglitazone for the treatment of diabetes. On March 1, 1997, it was licensed to Novo Nordisk of Denmark, the world leader in diabetes. DRL then became the first Indian pharmaceutical company to out-license an original molecule.

DRL is now a Rs 6,870-crore company and reported a net profit of Rs 907 crore in the year ended March 2012.