Producing diagnostic technologies for the Brazilian healthcare system

In vitro diagnostics (IVD) is a segment of the health biotechnology industry for which the major players are situated in developed countries. At the same time, the contemporary landscape has compelled multinational companies to transform their business models and non-Western countries to become both new markets and places where new knowledge and technology can be produced. Not only is Brazil an important market for healthcare products, but it also has a long-standing history of producing pharmaceutical and biological innovations. It is in this context that Brazilian actors have engaged in the manufacturing of IVD for infectious diseases. These initiatives articulate public health and industrial economy policies, a preferred approach of the new developmentalism (neo-desenvolvimentismo) that prevailed in the country from 2003 to 2016. In my presentation I discuss how these actors organize a public IVD manufacturing capacity in such a changing world, and at the crossroads of public health, technological autonomy and the national economy in Brazil.