This article is published in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, without restrictions, as long as the original work is correctly cited. In 1899, an epidemic of the bubonic plague struck the port city of Santos, São Paulo State, Brazil, a strategic hub for Brazil's exports. The event was at the heart of the Butantan Institute's subsequent creation. The Pasteur Institute in Paris (France) was the sole producer of anti-plague serum, which created difficulties for its rapid importation. The director of the São Paulo Health Service at the time, Emílio Ribas, thus proposed a solution to the provincial government to decrease foreign dependency: the founding of a lab to produce antisera in Brazil 1. This story is an example of Brazil's efforts to free itself of foreign dependency in the production and purchase of essential goods such as drugs, antisera, and vaccines. Unfortunately, this dependency has become more acute over time. The pharmachemical industry, among others, suffered a process of accelerated deindustrialization. In the last 40 years, the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) dropped from 55% to 5%, according to the Brazilian Pharmachemical Industry Association (Associação Brasileira da Indústria de Insumos Farmacêuticos-Abiquifi) 2. The issue has come under discussion again in recent months, due to the need to import active ingredients for production of the two vaccines approved for emergency CO-VID-19 use in Brazil. This dependency has become more evident, since in November 2020 some 50% of the volume of vaccines in advanced stages of development had been reserved by European Union countries, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan 3 , leaving middle-and low-income countries uncovered and prompting World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to condemn "vaccine nationalism" 4. Beginning in the 2000s, various industrial policy proposals aimed to reverse the situation of deindustrialization, including Brazil's domestic pharmaceutical industry among their targets. Dependency on imports of APIs and medicines, reflected in a trade balance deficit for the sector, sustained the argument of vulnerability of the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS) in the face of high prices and health technologies supply. This argument allowed the adoption of a series of instruments to promote domestic production of active ingredients and medicines. These have included the so-called Productive Development Partnerships (PDP), which use temporary exclusive reserve of the public market