We want to become the no. 1 diagnostics provider in the world: Mylab MD

Pune-headquartered Mylab Discovery Solutions, which is backed by Adar Poonawalla of Serum Institute of India (SII), has recently sold a 6.5 per cent stake to Zydus Lifesciences arm. The company came into the limelight during Covid-19 when it first developed an indigenous self-testing real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain kit to test the Sars-CoV-2 virus. Mylab Co-Founder and Managing Director HASMUKH RAWAL, in conversation with Sohini Das over the phone, outlines his plans. Edited excerpts.

With Zydus Animal Health and Investments (ZAHIL) picking up stake, are you now focusing on veterinary tests?

Zydus Lifesciences has invested through its subsidiary ZAHIL, but our focus is on complete health care — human, animal, and agricultural. Human health care is our key focus area.

Which are your focus areas after Covid-19?

In diagnostics, vaccines or drugs, a lot of work goes before a product is launched — in clinical trials, etc. In the past few years, we have focused on tuberculosis, cancer, and correlated diagnostics. This year we are building devices and kits, right from glucose testing to high-end tests. We want to give solutions for everything that happens inside a laboratory (lab).

Have you stopped making Covid self-test kits?

There is always a backup stockpile of Covid tests. We had planned for a lot of raw material in advance, and that gave us the buffer. Covid ceased to be a focus area a year and a half ago.

What is the rationale behind these deals with Zydus and SII?

They are strategic deals. We had the option of raising money from financial investors as well. We have enough money from our internal accruals. These are also strategic investments and partnerships. We want to build an ecosystem for health care solutions. They can happen through testing, treatment, and prevention. This is the first time in the world that a testing company, a vaccine maker, and a drug manufacturer have come together. If we look at disease elimination targets of the world, they align with such kinds of partnerships — where we can test, treat, and also prevent.

How do you plan to make such an offering to a patient?

Make sure all these high-end tests are decentralised, and doctors and pathology labs are empowered to run them. If tests are run only centrally, the response time is high. This is a special project we are working on called Healthtech Partners where Mylab is the health technology partner, whereby we want to empower all doctors and pathology labs in the country with test-treat-prevent solutions.

The Mylab ecosystem is capable of providing solutions. It need not be exclusive to Zydus or SII, but any provider of drugs and vaccines.

Our tie-up is a strategic one where we learn from each other’s research and development (R&D) processes, and can implement that in our product development.

Will you get into opening diagnostic centres?

We will never run a pathology lab ourselves. We want to empower a partner. If the partner needs hand-holding or needs a doctor to connect, we will do so.

What about your investment plans?

We have acquired stake in three companies. An X-ray technology firm Lipomic; medical tech company Sciverse Solutions; and Sanskritech, developer of Swayam (a fully automated point-of-care diagnostic system to test for 70-plus diseases within minutes).

We are in talks to acquire a stake in a fourth company in the agricultural space. A lot of investment has gone into the R&D and infrastructure.

We have 250 scientists on board now. We have started construction of a new facility near Pune, and in the first phase, it will require a $20 million investment, and eventually, another $20-30 million will be pumped in.

We want to become the no. 1 diagnostics provider in the world. We will not only make innovations before the world thinks but will also supply them to the world.