MESSAGE FROM THE COORDINATOR OF THE INCT-INOFAR 2009

Foto: Lucia Beatriz Torres
	Pharmaceuticals are the active principles of medications. They can have several distinct pharmaceutical forms, due to the technological component used in their production, observing a rigorous quality criteria defined by the currently effective regulations. Medications are, therefore, industrialized products essential to the recovery, maintenance, preservation, and promotion of Health, and they represent indispensable tools in public health policies. Pharmaceuticals and medications are directly involved in the continuous increase of life expectancy for men and women, providing them a higher quality of life as well as more social welfare.
Prof. Eliezer J. Barreiro Coordinator of INCT-INOFAR

The world pharmaceutical market reached, in 2009, US$ 785 billion. Brazil represented around 10% of that market, reaching R$ 19 billion in the same year. This number is made up of brand name pharmaceuticals, as well as generic medications – those without patent protection – with the latter representing 22% of medication sales in Brazil. This important industrial sector, which is one of the five most important worldwide, has as one of its main characteristics its strong dependence on scientific research and innovation, especially breakthrough innovation, but also, on a smaller scale, on the so called incremental innovation.  It is not sheer coincidence or chance that the main pharmaceutical companies that invent/discover innovative medications do so in the countries where they are headquartered, for the most part, or in their research centers located in countries with a strong scientific tradition. A few cooperation contracts and specialized technical-scientific services are established between Big Pharmas and smaller technological based companies, representing outsourcing that already happens as part of the strategies adopted by this sector. 

Brazil has an excellent postgraduate education system, which is responsible for awarding ca. 10,000 doctoral titles and 30,000 master's degrees. Many of these masters and doctors are involved in multidisciplinary projects in the search for new pharmaceuticals and medications, especially in the areas of Health, Biological, and Exact Sciences. In these areas there are strategic fields for the sector, like Pharmacy, Pharmacology, and Chemistry, with several specialties such as Medicinal Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, and Synthesis Chemistry. Brazil is responsible for ca.  2.6% of the production of new scientific knowledge worldwide, with over 32,000 publishings in 2009. This powerful reality of scientific ability has not yet translated itself into scientific knowledge capable of producing our own pharmaceuticals, ones that “speak our own language”, needed in the pharmaceutical care of our population, which is our biggest asset. Unfortunately, our medications in Brazil “speak” all the other languages, except our own!

The goal of the National Institute of Science and Technology of Drugs and Medicines - INCT-INOFAR – is to contribute to revert this situation in the country, aiming to bring together and organize existing national competencies in several scientific specialties that are part of the chain of innovation in pharmaceuticals and medications, distributed in several universities and/or research institutes, most of them part of the public system of higher education in Brazil, articulating them around research projects in pharmaceutical and medications sciences, with goals of inventing new pharmaceuticals that represent radical innovations. Another goal of the INCT-INOFAR is to articulate efforts for the development of routes of synthesis for generic pharmaceuticals that are part of the national list of essential medications for the public health system, representing significant expense of resources due to the volumes imported, as well as for new generic pharmaceuticals, represented by those that will soon have expired patents. 

INCT-INOFAR also has a mission of fostering an environment favorable to the transfer of technologies discovered or created in these platforms to the productive pharmaceutical business sector, both public and private. As part of this path, new possible weak spots in this chain of innovation may be detected and identified, such as the one already recorded in the extreme lack of scaling laboratories, which seriously reduces the inventive capabilities of this sector. This search for technological qualification also allows for the proposal of new solutions to live up to our technological potential in this important sector of the health industrial complex: pharmaceuticals and medications.

To complement the INCT-INOFAR mission statements, there are also personnel qualification actions on all levels, among which we must emphasize postgraduate education in Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, and Toxicology, the promotion of qualification courses in aspects of intellectual property, as well as other initiatives, carried out jointly with other INCTs or otherwise, and the publicizing and popularizing of Pharmaceuticals and Medications Sciences. INCT-INOFAR maintains a website – Pharmaceuticals Portal – to promote and increase awareness in the safe and rational use of medications.

Eliezer J. Barreiro
Professor – UFRJ
Coordinator of INCT-INOFAR