Billionaire family behind world’s largest vaccine producer pledges $66M to Oxford University

The billionaire Indian family behind the world’s largest vaccine producer — Serum Institute of India (SII) — is donating upwards of $60 million to Oxford University to fund its new research center, which will be home to the scientists that developed the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine.

Oxford University announced the donation on Wednesday and said that the university’s Old Road campus will be named the Poonawalla Vaccines Research building for the Poonawalla family following a donation of $66.2 million.

The donation will be made through SII’s London subsidiary, Serum Life Sciences, which is chaired by Natasha Poonawalla, the executive director of SII and the wife of the company’s CEO, Adar Poonawalla.

The new facility will house more than 300 research scientists and will help scale up the university’s key vaccine development programs, the statement said.

“Importantly, the Poonawalla Building will house the headquarters and main laboratory space of the Jenner Institute, the world-leading academic vaccine institute named after Edward Jenner, the father of vaccination. The most recent Serum Institute-Jenner Institute collaboration saw the rapid development and global roll-out of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at scale,” Oxford University added.

“I am delighted that through this generous gift we will be able to further our work on vaccines which have proven so critical to global health. We will also ensure that we are never again caught unprepared for a global pandemic,” Professor Louise Richardson, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, said.

The Poonawalla family is the seventh richest family in India, with an estimated $15 billion (£11 billion) fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. SII produces over 1.5 billion doses annually of a range of vaccines, including for measles, polio and the flu.

The news of the family’s donation comes just a week after Adar Poonawalla announced that SII will halve the production of its COVID-19 vaccine because it has no fresh orders, according to the BBC.

Poonawalla said earlier this year that his family had fled India and moved to England to escape threats from people claiming he’s holding up COVID-19 vaccines for profit.