Brazil harvests the wealth of its rain forests
| Author | Michael Ryan |
| Position | First published in the IP Legal Times of May 2006 |
When a man in Brazil injured his knee while playing football, a local healer urged him to apply the leaf alcohol of the maria milagrosa plant on his knee to relieve the swelling. It worked. The injured man, who was the founder of the French-Brazilian drug manufacturers, Aché, was impressed with the market potential for such a wonder remedy in a country full of football players. He recruited a University of Sao Paulo scientist to isolate the active compound.
But that was the easy part. Who would pay to develop the best formulation of a new anti-inflammatory drug? Who would pay for the toxicology studies? Who would pay for the laboratory tests, the animal trials, and the human trials? If all these investments were made, how could competitors be prevented from analyzing the chemical composition of the final product and selling it under their own brand names?
The story took place in Brazil in the early 1980s, when Brazilian law did not permit the patenting of pharmaceuticals. That meant the answers to all the above were negative: not Aché and, indeed, no-one, as competitors could not be stopped from freely copying the invention. Government scientists may have seen the myriad possibilities, but a lack of financial investment in the private sector severely constricted the pipeline from laboratory to marketplace.
Brazil has long recognized that the vast jungles traversed by the Amazon River hold tremendous wealth. But traditionally efforts to exploit these resources focused on drilling for oil and natural gas, mining for minerals, cutting of trees, and planting of agricultural crops. Amazonia possesses the world's greatest biodiversity - extraordinary flora and fauna seen nowhere else - however biomedical research was not a priority for Brazil. Companies were reluctant to invest in the long process of research and development. And the public and private sectors did not work together.
That started to change in 1996 when the Brazilian government undertook a major reform of its patent law. The new patent regime permitted patents on pharmaceutical products and processes, provided a 20-year term of exclusive rights, and barred parallel imports of patented products.
The new policy had immediate effect. That same year Aché's founding families decided to hire a team of executives with experience in global pharmaceutical management. The new president articulated a business strategy to market drugs previously unavailable in the Brazilian marketplace in partnership with multinational companies and to push Aché itself into the innovation business.
The new R&D director heard the story of the anti-inflammatory...
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