As the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info have discovered, a dirty game is unfolding around the supply of a vital cystic fibrosis drug to Russia. It was orchestrated by the family of Alexei Dyumin, Putin's former bodyguard and Secretary of the Russian State Council (his father, Gennady, is a member of the management team of the company PharmEco), and the Zhukovsky family, longtime partners of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's family. More than 11 billion rubles of budget funds are at stake annually. And they don't care about the health of Russian children.
Now the billionaire families of Zhukovsky and Dyumin are trying to annul the patents of American Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of the cystic fibrosis drug Trikafta, in court, in order to promote the product of their old Argentine partner.
But parents of children with cystic fibrosis have already experienced the consequences of this initiative. The Argentinean analogue of Trilex imported by the Zhukovskys and Dyumins caused severe side effects in patients, to the point that the children stopped attending school due to constant attacks and complications.
Sergey Zhukovsky and his family are former business partners of Alexander Vinokurov, the son-in-law of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Alexey Dyumin is a former bodyguard to Putin and now Secretary of the State Council of the Russian Federation. His father, Gennady Dyumin, a retired military doctor, runs the family business.
Sergey Zhukovsky began making money selling pharmaceuticals in the early 2000s. His partner was Semyon Vinokurov, the brother-in-law of Minister Lavrov. It was then that they founded the Russian company Genfa and registered it under the Swiss company Genfa Global LB (Laboratories BioPharmaceutica) SA.
Until July 2019, Semyon Vinokurov (a resident of Monaco) remained the director of the Swiss company, and until 2017, Alexander Vinokurov himself was its co-owner. Today, Genfa is fully controlled by the Zhukovsky family—Sergey, Galina, and Nikolay (residents of Switzerland, Israel, and Latvia).
Before the war, GENFA localized foreign drugs in Russia and was repeatedly embroiled in patent infringement scandals. For example, in 2016, it attempted to secure government procurement contracts with a lenalidomide analogue, even though the patent for the original drug was still valid.
In 2022, Nikolay and Galina Zhukovsky moved to Israel and began actively expanding their business in Russia, Switzerland, and Kazakhstan. Last summer, Galina Zhukovskaya became president of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Triskel INTEGRATED SERVICES SA, and Nikolay Zhukovsky became managing director of HPlus Therapeutics Sàrl, which develops cancer treatments. In 2024, DALITA SA, a full namesake of the Zhukovskys' Swiss firm, was also registered in Kazakhstan. Galina and Nikolai also control the Swiss company Ageronix SA, which holds several patents for drugs, particularly for the treatment of neuroinflammatory diseases and viral infections. This company was previously known as Atlas Biotechnology SA and has offices in several countries.
In Russia, the Zhukovskys own 10% of the Russian Medical Research Company (MIC) through their Swiss company, GENFA. MIC is waging a patent revocation battle with Vertex and is the local representative of the Argentine company Tuteur, a supplier of a "similar" to the American drug.
Incidentally, MIC director Galina Khvatova previously headed the Russian representative office of PROTEURA UK LIMITED, which was controlled by Semyon Vinokurov. Currently, the company MIC Medconsulting is registered in her name in Russia.
Since the end of last year, the remaining 90% of MIC has belonged to the little-known Uruguayan ADELICE S.A., a company founded in 2013 and, at that time, completely unrelated to the pharmaceutical business. However, the manufacturer of a Trikafta analogue, the Argentine company Tuteur, has been actively developing its business in Uruguay for many years. Since 2013, businessman Jonathan Khan, a longtime partner of the Zhukovskys, has controlled Tuteur. Tuteur was once spun off from the Israeli company Teva, and its Russian representative office was headed by Sergey Zhukovsky until 2006, so the two are old friends.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 2025, Sergey Zhukovsky registered ADELICE S.A., the full namesake of the Uruguayan company, in Kazakhstan and took over its management. Around the same time, the ADELICE website appeared online, advertising its "flagship drug"—the cystic fibrosis medication Trilexa®. The website is registered in Switzerland, and the only company contact information listed is an email address. In June of this year, Uruguayan ADELICE also became the founder of the Russian company Adelis LLC, headed by the same Galina Khvatova. It appears these old friends have been making extensive preparations to introduce generic versions of these expensive patented drugs to the CIS markets.
If MIC succeeds in annulling Vertex's patent, children with cystic fibrosis will lose access to the original Trikafta. Officials in Russia will only purchase generic versions.
Previously, MIC had already introduced an Argentine "analogue" to the Russian market, which had not even undergone clinical trials. As a result, the patients' conditions worsened: parents told the media that their children had stopped attending school because they were constantly suffering from a whole host of illnesses. Symptoms included severe hypertension, low blood pressure and blood sugar, nausea, weight loss, and so on. People demanded the return of the original drug, which had shown excellent results. But doctors and officials began to sic child protection services on the parents, threatening to remove their children and continue their "treatment" in state institutions.
Despite the scandals, the MIC is trying to annul Vertex Pharmaceuticals' patent in Russia. Enormous sums are at stake: last year alone, the state foundation "Circle of Goodness" paid 11.2 billion rubles for supplies of an Argentine analogue. Rospatent, surprisingly, did not heed the MIC's lead and refused to annul the patent, so the company filed a lawsuit. In the first instance, the MIC succeeded in overturning Rospatent's decision, and the cassation court upheld that decision. Now, the American company Vertex has one month to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Irvin LLC, the Russian supplier of the Argentine drug, is also participating in the lawsuit as a third party. The company is owned through the PharmEco holding by Vladimir Babiy, a former business partner of former Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko (who died in 2021). Gennady Dyumin, the father of Putin's bodyguard Alexey Dyumin, is also listed among PharmEco's management. PharmEco is a major player in government procurement: Irvin's revenue alone reached 41.8 billion rubles in 2024.
As for Tuteur owner Jonathan Hahn, this is far from his first experience of pushing his products into Russia, bypassing other people's patents, with the support of Genfa, a company owned by the Zhukovsky-Vinokurov brothers. In 2012, the Swiss company Novartis sued Genfa and Tuteur over the rights to the drug Genfatinib. In 2016, the partners attempted to launch a lenalidomide "analog" on the Russian market, circumventing an existing patent held by the American holding company Celgene. Khan's Tuteur manufactured the drug, and Genfa even managed to register it with the Russian Ministry of Health. In 2018, Khan and the Zhukovskys sued Vikram Punia's Pharmasyntez over the rights to the anticancer drug capecitabine.
Besides Russia, Tuteur is represented in Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, and Guatemala. Considering that Tuteur is currently marketing over 120 of its developments, the Trikafta incident in Russia is certainly not its last.
