Hot Seat

Different strokes

Sarma Duddu, the MD of Nektar Lifesciences is one of those who believe that if you wait for a good time to come, you end up waiting for a pretty good time. He prefers to work towards opportunities and his life is all about being there when the good time comes. Sonal Shukla finds out

Broadening the horizons

Sarma's family was an amalgamation of 'people of sciences'. There were experts in biology, chemistry and engineering. Ever since childhood, he had toyed with the idea of putting them all together. Interestingly, pharmacy was a career choice which he thought was the intersection between all the sciences. Everybody understood pharmacy from a biology angle but Sarma wanted to bring forth the physics and engineering aspect of the field. His passion to bring divergent disciplines together propelled him to take material science as a thesis subject.

Failures are the stepping stones to success and it turned out to be quite true in his case. When he could not get through the IIT entrance, he did not loose heart instead he turned it into an opportunity.

“I took a broader view and asked myself as what exactly I wanted to do? I saw a great potential in pharmacy,” he says. Sarma completed his B.Pharm, topped the university with few gold medals and the coveted IDMA award. That was not the end of his knowledge quest. He took his PhD from the University of Minnesota. With broad understanding, he derived advantage of the multidisciplinary approach, which was his driving force throughout his soaring career graph.

Perfect timing

Sarma got a chance to bring in his expertise in material science when he joined SmithKline Beecham. He could leverage his academic training to get ahead of the curve and understand how an in-licensing company like SmithKline looks at in-licensing of technology from a business angle. It was the age of biotech explosion in US and SmithKline was on the bandwagon too. It had biotechnology products which were mostly proteins and peptides with very different problems to overcome from a chemisty and material science standpoint.

Traditionally, pharma industry never dealt with proteins. But, Sarma used his technical expertise to accelerate the protein development by applying fundamental scientific principles in the development of the protein therapeutics.

Once again opportunity knocked at his door in the form of Inhale therapeutics which later turned in to Nektar. Unlike SmithKline, it was a small company with about 40 people. yet, Sarma sensed a scope to use his knowledge of business principles. “I joined the company at an early stage. It was a high risk proposition but I truly believed in the concept,” he says. There was something in Inhale Therapeutics, that drew him to the company-the vision of maximising the therapeutic value of drug products.

As his vision was same as that of the company's, he played a distinguishing role in the company. He was developing new technology and new products. Nektar as a company had a very strong relationship with its partners big and small, which again turned out to be an opportunity and learning experience for Sarma to look at how each company views different aspects and take the best of both the words. He joined as an Associate Director of Pharmaceutical Development and expanded to other functional areas of Research, Corporate Development and Strategy.

“That really solidified my interest as well as my understanding from the business angle so I was able to accomplish technical as well as the business aspects that are related to grow a small industry,” he says.

Early 2000 was the time when Nektar as a company was in the phase of transformation from being a company which licenses technology to pharmaceutical companies to a company with its own product line. Nektar wanted to develop products of its own and so needed to substantially expand its R&D capabilities. After this transformation from Inhale therapeutic Systems to Nektar, Sarma became the VP for pharmaceutical development.

Driving force

What he really likes about his job is the freedom to do something different every day. Currently what drives Duddu is a challenge to manage Nektar's front end pharmaceutical R&D in India. “If you look at the companies that have taken similar approach like us, what we are doing in India is fundamen-tally different. We actually consider our India operation as a part of our global R&D and not an outsourcing unit which is doing some work for us in the US.” Nektar is one of the few companies who came in after India signed TRIPS agreement.

The dynamic nature of his job and the ability to create not just drugs or products but a talent pool of young people and orienting them to global scale pharmaceutical research is what drives this man. Sarma Duddu's current work profile as an MD of Nektar Therapeutic, India, provides him with an opportunity to communicate with people about global pharmaceutical development and how we can best leverage the talent available in India.

He believes that not often one gets an opportunity where you present your ideas to the management and get its full support to go with them. “I was given an opportunity to follow my guts and I made it and was able to show the results!”

The success formula

Always believe in yourself and keep challenging convention wisdom. This is what Sarma has always believed in and done throughout his life. Companies are going global and it will take team work and good communication skills to navigate the path of success. Different persons at different phases of his career influenced him in different ways. His PhD professor taught him to be objective and unbiased while doing technical evaluation. Ajit Gill, CEO of Nektar was a person who he really looked up to as a role model for building an entire organisation. “One needs to think in a proactive manner by understanding the pulse of the industry by continuously assessing where it is moving,” Sarma opines. Today everybody know that a lot is going in India but Sarma actually moved ahead of the race and got Nektar to start operation in India before any other company did.

What really matters?

Nektar Therapeutics' current focus in India is on exploratory growth, that is, rapid parallel processing of company's ideas through animal and early human testing. Sarma Duddu like any other MD wants to make Nektar India a success story that will drive a pipeline for Nektar as a global organisation. All these big plans and objectives are there to stay. At the end of the day, management, career and growth is all fine but when product actually hits the patient's hand that is the biggest achievement which Sarma craves for.

editorial@expresspharmaonline.com