This Chhapra boy has built a global tech biz for life sciences

Time of India

3 days ago

Prabha Sinha says his firm, ZS, works with 199 of the top 200 pharma companies in the world; his India centres have become central to the company, and host 10,000 of the 13,000 employees globally; a lot of the work now is around analytics & AI
BENGALURU:
The day before we spoke,
Prabha Sinha
had had litti and chokha for lunch, and some more Bihari cuisine for dinner at Potbelly restaurant in
Bihar
Niwas in Delhi. 'Couldn't resist it,' he says laughing.
Prabha, founder of
ZS
– a US consulting and technology firm that works with 199 of the top 200 pharma companies in the world – was born in
Chhapra
in Bihar. His father was a lawyer, and they lived in a joint family with his uncle who had a farm. When it was time for school, Prabha was put in a boarding school in Patna, some 70 km away. But he loved visiting his village, loved running around barefoot there.
Prabha did well in school, and got into IIT Kharagpur's mechanical engineering course. From there, like many IITians of the time, he moved to the US for a PhD. His advisor in the University of Massachusetts (UMass) was someone who was involved in both engineering and operations research, and so the PhD combined both aspects, and eventually Prabha found himself teaching quantitative methods in business schools – first at UMass, and then at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. At Kellogg, he came across Andy Zoltners, a professor in marketing, and together they did some research on optimisation algorithms for sales forces. They then started applying the algorithms to issues like how large sales forces should be, how best to deploy sales forces geographically, how to optimise size and deployment simultaneously.
This was the 1970s. A few companies with mainframes used the algorithms. But the big breakthrough came in 1981, when IBM popularised PCs. 'That allowed us to display answers directly to end-users and interact with them,' Prabha says.
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aireuropa.com
Undo
In 1983, they founded ZS, a combination of the first letter of their surnames.
Initially, ZS worked with many industries, but the biggest traction came from life sciences. This persuaded them to focus on that industry. Today, they work across the life science spectrum, from
drug discovery
and development to commercialisation and patient engagement.
India's central role
India began to assume importance for ZS in the 2000s, when Prabha and Andy saw an opportunity in moving beyond IP-based consulting to also implement IT for clients. For one of the most regulated industries in the world, IT was becoming critical, and surely there was no better place for IT than India. That importance surged over the past decade, as analytics and AI became core to businesses. Today, India accounts for three-quarters of ZS' 13,000 employees worldwide, and they are involved in almost everything ZS does.
ZS' biggest centres in India are in Pune and Gurugram. It also has centres in Bengaluru, Chennai and Noida. About 10,000 of its 13,000 employees are in India. The company has 385 shareholders. Of them, 13% are in India and 20% started life in India. ZS is becoming more Indian owned, founder Prabha Sinha says
Analytics and AI is where ZS is increasingly focusing. Prabha says if there's a rare disease, ZS can help its pharma customers find potential patients for clinical studies by mining patient data in, say, the US.
Mohit Sood
, who leads the India operations and who has spent 18 years with ZS, says his teams developed a digital twin for a pharma company's supply chain. The system flags possible errors and hindrances in the supply chain much in advance. 'We've been able to improve their ability to match the demand and supply by more than 30%,' Mohit says.
In the coming times, Mohit says, bringing far greater efficiencies would become critical as drug development focuses on niche diseases. These, he says, will bring in revenue of only about half a billion dollars, compared to traditional blockbuster drugs for mass diseases that yielded revenue of $3 bn to $6 bn. And there's fierce competition. That means costs of drug development, commercialisation, and patient engagement all have to drop sharply. 'Close to about 500 drug launches are planned from 2026 onwards. So there's going to be a lot of action,' Mohit says.
India will be in the thick of it. Prabha was in Delhi because ZS decided to have its annual board meeting here. 'That gives you some insight about how important India has become for us,' he says.
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Prabha Sinha, Founder, ZS
Our India team is now part of almost every project we do anywhere in the world. About three years ago, we launched an AI-powered analytics platform for organisations to run their sales and marketing functions. Most of the development and support of that is done in India. Some 150 companies today use it. If a salesperson in the US is going to visit a customer, AI agents advise him on what he should do with the customer, what offers he should make, what messages might resonate. The platform even advises them on which customers they should see. They are getting just-in-time advice.
- Prabha Sinha, Founder, ZS
Mohit Sood, Regional Managing Principal, ZS India
The biggest thing that GenAI and classical AI are able to do together is to narrow down the set of molecules for drug discovery for the particular target you have. So, rather than going to wet labs, injecting it in the patient and seeing what happens, you're able to use AI and a ton of data to be able to conduct in silico experiments (computer simulations). This improves throughput dramatically. Another big impact of AI is in improving the operational efficiency of clinical trials. For any drug, you depend on 100 to 250 clinical sites for trials. The adherence to protocols across all these sites, documentation of all evidence, quality checks, and finally the ability to produce it to the US FDA or the European Agency, is not an easy task. With AI and GenAI, we'll be able to collect the data much more appropriately, identify data errors early on, ensure all data lineage.
- Mohit Sood, Regional Managing Principal, ZS India
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