HRV Pharma is a virtual company. And not in the sense of being a digital enterprise.

The ten-year-old Hyderabad-based company doesn’t own a factory or make a medicine, yet it does business in no less than 55 countries. Its stock-in-trade is less tangible but more profitable: “drug visa”.

That’s industry parlance for DMF—drug master file—which is essentially a regulatory stamp of approval to export medicines. 

Getting a DMF means the American drug regulator, the FDA, is convinced that the active ingredient in a........

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