Health Innovation and Social Justice in Brazil

Molecular Sovereignty: Building a Blood Screening Test for the Brazilian Nation

“…Nevertheless, this did not prevent the Ministry of Health, under the leadership of José Serra, from experimenting with new forms of market regulation for life-saving medicines-and in particular, from working with civil society and the national pharmaceutical industries to circumvent monopolies. This they did through legal, technological, and political strategies ranging from the public manufacturing of antiretroviral therapies to advocating for the flexibilization of patent rights in international forums (Biehl 2007;Cassier and Corrêa 2018).…”

“…In negotiating transfer agreements, an approach to acquiring capacity and mastering platforms that can yield other benefits in the form of new uses and homegrown research and development, Brazil's public-industrial actors anticipated the prospect of gradual technological independence. Such initiatives became instruments of Brazil's national industrial policy from the late 2000s and into the 2010s, and were often criticised at the international level by the US Trade Department for their potential threat to US corporations' interests (Cassier and Corrêa 2018). However, their ambitious goals failed to resolve the long-standing challenge of consolidating Brazilian innovation.…”

“…The intertwining of industrial and healthcare autonomy has formed a focus for academic literature on pharmaceutical autonomy (Flynn 2015;Loyola 2008). It also manifested in Brazil's ambitious industrial policies of the 2000s-2010s, which sought to nationalise production of the various technologies provided by the state through the SUS, such as medicines, vaccines, and diagnostic devices (Gadelha et al 2013;Cassier and Corrêa 2018). The development of the blood screening test in Brazil offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between pharmaceutical development and sovereignty in the context of the increasing molecularisation of health.…”