New Delhi, July 14 -- The road to drug discovery is long, arduous and littered with failure, but the payoff at the end makes it worth the trouble. It's a lesson that India's best pharmaceutical entrepreneurs knew all along. Yet, it took a Glenn Saldanha to prove it.

"We were always resilient in how we approached innovation. I think that's what finally rewarded us," Saldanha, chief executive officer and managing director of Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd, told Mint in an exclusive interview.

He was referring to one of the largest deals for an Indian biopharma firm after Glenmark's US-based unit Ichnos Glenmark Innovation (IGI) secured a $700-million exclusive licensing agreement with AbbVie for its blood cancer drug candidate last week. Ab...