Serum Institute of India Brand Guidelines: A Pune Stud Farm, 1966 & Covishield

Racehorses, a snakebite and a serum works.

Serum Institute of India began on a stud farm. The Poonawalla family had bred racehorses on their land outside Pune since 1946, NPR reported in March 2021, and part of the property is still a stud farm. In the 1960s the family donated retired horses to the government’s Haffkine Institute in what was then Bombay, which used the horses’ blood to make serums and vaccines.

The company’s origin story, as NPR told it, turns on a snakebite. In 1966 one of the family’s horses was bitten; the Haffkine laboratory held anti-venom serum but needed permission from officials about 100 miles away, and with poor telephone lines the permission took four days. That delay gave Cyrus Poonawalla the idea of making serums himself, and he founded the Serum Institute of India that same year, using the blood of his own horses, NPR reported. The company’s own site shows him laying the foundation stone on 12 June 1966, with his parents beside him.

The first products were serums against tetanus and snake bites, NPR says. The company says this made India self-sufficient in tetanus antitoxin and anti-snake-venom serum, followed by the DTP group of vaccines (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) and later the MMR group (measles, mumps and rubella). English Wikipedia describes the founding aim as making immunobiologicals that India was then importing at high prices, and the company tells the same story.

It has stayed a family business. Cyrus Poonawalla’s son Adar Poonawalla joined in 2001 and became chief executive in 2011, English Wikipedia says; it credits him with a push into export markets and with seeking World Health Organization pre-qualification so the company could supply United Nations agencies such as UNICEF and PAHO. NPR called Serum a family-run private company in 2021, and quoted Adar Poonawalla saying that a decision to make Covid-19 vaccines before trial results came in took “a quick five-minute chat” with his father. The company trades as Serum Institute of India Pvt. Ltd. and is part of the Cyrus Poonawalla Group.

Childhood vaccines at volume.

Its range is built around childhood immunisation. The company names polio, BCG, the DTP group and the measles, mumps and rubella group among its vaccines, alongside hepatitis B, Hib, pneumococcal and Covid-19 vaccines, and it still makes antisera such as anti-snake-venom serum.

Scale is the claim most often attached to the name, and it is the company’s own: it says it is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by number of doses produced and sold, at more than 1.5 billion doses; that its vaccines are used in national immunisation programmes in around 170 countries; and that about 65% of the world’s children receive at least one vaccine it has made. NPR in 2021 called it the world’s largest vaccine-producing company and reported that it makes more than 1.5 billion doses a year, not counting Covid-19 vaccines; English Wikipedia gives about 1.9 billion doses a year as of 2023. The company says its vaccines are accredited by the WHO.

It expanded abroad in 2012, buying Bilthoven Biologicals in the Netherlands from the Dutch government. The company dates the deal to 29 June 2012 and says it brought the technology to make injectable polio vaccine and a manufacturing base in Europe. English Wikipedia calls it the company’s first international acquisition.

Partnerships brought it wider attention. With AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford it made Covishield, the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine; English Wikipedia says it sought emergency approval in India in December 2020 and received it a month later. NPR, visiting the Pune plant in March 2021, watched vials leave the lines at around 5,000 a minute and reported that the company had promised half its output to the Indian government. It also agreed to make Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine as Covovax, and with Oxford’s Jenner Institute it developed the R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine, which uses a Novavax adjuvant; English Wikipedia says World Health Organization advisory groups recommended it for use in October 2023.

Design and documentation.

Vaccine makers sell to health ministries, procurement agencies, hospitals and clinicians long before any patient sees a pack, and their visual language reflects that audience. The imagery tends to stay close to the work itself: gloved hands holding a vial up to the light, rows of filled vials on a stainless line, and researchers in lab coats at a bench or a microscope. The point of these pictures is to show process and care rather than spectacle.

Production is a second recurring subject. Company photographs often show clean production suites, with staff in full gowns, hoods and masks behind glass, and long views of filling lines, bioreactors and freezers. For mRNA companies in particular, the plant itself has become part of the story, and new sites tend to be photographed and announced as milestones in their own right.

A third strand is global health. Vaccine makers frequently show clinics, community health workers and the cold chain: insulated boxes, refrigerated trucks and storage rooms that keep doses within a temperature range on the way to where they are used. Maps, partner logos and the names of public bodies often sit alongside these images, because much of the business runs through governments, international agencies and non-profit funders.

The trade has its own meeting places. Conferences such as the World Vaccine Congress and ESCMID Global, the congress of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, bring companies, researchers and buyers together. In a field where so many pictures show similar vials, gowns and laboratories, a name, a typeface and a single accent colour often do much of the work of telling one company from another.

A descriptive name, kept since 1966.

The name records the business the company began in: serums made from horse blood, NPR’s account shows. Sixty years on it still trades under that plain, descriptive name, though its range has long since moved on to vaccines. It remains in Pune, where the original campus and the stud farm sit side by side, NPR reported, and its own pages show a newer plant at Manjri, also in Pune, opened by the Union health minister alongside Cyrus and Adar Poonawalla.

Leadership has passed within the family rather than out of it. English Wikipedia describes Cyrus Poonawalla as chairman and managing director of the Cyrus Poonawalla Group, which includes the Serum Institute, and Adar Poonawalla as its chief executive and a board member of Gavi, the vaccine alliance.

For a design guide, Serum Institute of India shows how a family company can keep a founding name that describes its first product long after its range has moved on. Compare AstraZeneca, its partner on Covishield, and Novavax, whose adjuvant is used in R21/Matrix-M. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a warm ochre and a pale sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Serum Institute of India’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.