Kiran Mazumdar - Shaw is a very busy lady. The 47-year-old chairman & managing director of Bangalore-based Biocon India, on a whistlestop visit to Mumbai from the Garden City on Thursday, September 27, was just in time to be present for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year award nite at the Oberoi.

She was one of the eight finalists shortlisted for the award. Trying to draw her attention was nearly impossible, what with a string of corporate heads queuing up to congratulate her. What about tomorrow? It's all tied up in back-to-back appointments around town," she said.

The next day, at a public lecture at the Mumbai University Department of Chemical Technology (UDCT), she spoke on India as a learning society. She was terribly excited about her presentation. For good reason too : the UDCT is a rich picking ground for biotechnology and chemical companies. Biocon has some 180 scientists and engineers working for it, and more than 30 are from the UDCT, she said in her opening remarks at the old auditorium. The more than 200 eager beavers from the department were hooked.

She spoke on how learning companies were creating the maximum wealth in the shortest possible time and how it was possible to replicate this model in a learning society -- one that placed a premium on doing things differently, finding new ways of thinking, etc."

"Her short point was that creating new technologies and applying new knowledge were rewards in themselves. What she didn't say was that the tonnes of money that you might make in the process was just incidental. she should know. Having started out 20 years ago, Mazumdar - Shaw is a master brewer by training. Mixing yeast and enzymes to get the same quality of beer and spirits, batch after batch, was something that couldn't keep her occupied full time.

Why shouldn't I be doing some money-spinning enzymes?" she has begun to wonder.

Soon, she started off with papain, the enzyme formed in papayas, which is abundant, and, therefore, the cheapest enzyme source around. But it wasn't a good break because too many people were into it. she wanted to do something different.

This quest has led her to 15 patents for novel enzymes in the last four years and a war chest of 73 enzymes in all, all of which are in commercial production.

Recalling her early days in the business, in the broader paradigm of learning organisations, Mazumdar - Shaw tells UDCT students that her challenge was to be the lowest-cost manufacturer, because controlling costs was the only way to stay ahead of competition.

"But when we started doing novel enzymes, the challenge was in looking for new production techniques : the kind where we could split one production stream into four different products," she says.

"The point is to think differently -- to tweak available knowledge into newer applications. Can I do this differently?"

Examples flow off the podium : "Biocon has 25 per cent of the world market for pectinases, and we hope to reach a level of 50 per cent," Mazumdar - Shaw says, adding that it is a $60 million business globally.

Biocon is the first Indian company to get US Food & Drugs Administration (FDA) approval for fermentation-derived molecules for pharmaceutical uses. "As a matter of fact," she drills home, "it is the only company from the Third World to get an FDA patent".

This is the most happening sector, she says, as she waits for her car to draw up (she's on her way back to Bangalore). "Molecules derived through chemical processes are toxic and costly. Bio-transformation is a more eco-friendly and cheap way of producing the same molecules that go into pharma preparations," she explains.

Biocon has "developed, machined and manufactured a completely indigenous, fully automated hybrid reactor, which is the stepping stone for the commercial utilisation of this technology," she says.

Biocon is also getting into studies at the genomic level, she tells the assembled students. That means, fish around for disease-specific information in "well-characterised patients" at the genetic level.

Later, thronged by students over a cup of the customary post-talk tea, she explains that the idea is to get a sample of patients with a confirmed pattern of the disease and map their genetic code.

"Later, computers sift through this mountain of information for exact replication of some patterns. "That holds the key : first to the fail-proof diagnostics of the disease and secondly, to the therapeutics for it. It is a dicey business, to be sure, very costly and time consuming. But correspondingly, the returns are very high. Companies with verifiably distilled knowledge can then either work towards their own solutions to the problem or can sell the database to other companies. either way, the payoffs are worth the effort. One of her companies, Clinigene, she says, is working on Type - II diabetes, the kind that does not respond to insulin treatment.

Also on the drawing board is something more fundamental : Proteomics, the study of the patterns of proteins making up the gene code. In a way, that is one level deeper into the building block of human cells.

Today, the three Biocon group companies -- Biocon, Clinigene and Syngene -- have a combined turnover of $50 million (Rs. 240 crore).

Kiran Mazumdar - Shaw holds 70 per cent in Biocon India, the flagship formed after the merger of Biocon Quest, Biochemizyme and pharma company Biocon Helix. And another 75 per cent in Syngene, the contract research organisation. Clinigene, which is foraying into clinical research, is a fully family-owned company.

The group's client list boasts the largest global pharma companies, such as Glaxo-Wellcome, Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca.

"Analysts suggest the Shaw duo's investment of $50 million in the business should be worth anywhere upwards of $500 million, putting their personal wealth at around Rs. 1,700 crore, though some experts doubt such high valuation.

Mazumdar - Shaw says she is hosting an international conference on biotechnology in Bangalore in January 2002, with the simple objective of demystifying the subject for ordinary investors, the government and even venture capitalists. Though money has never been a problem for her own endeavours, she realises that a whole new generation of biotech entrepreneurs are being held back due to lack of resources.

"Venture capitalists perhaps find the subject too dense, too futuristic to be comfortable funding wacky ideas," she says."