Facing the coronavirus crisis: Opportunities and challenges in developing countries, the Argentina case

Abstract

The coronavirus crisis has exposed tensions in the global pharmaceutical industry and shortages of the global supply chains within the framework of an unprecedented concentration and centralization of capital, highlighting countries interest in having domestic capabilities to respond to pandemic demands. The breaking down of pharmaceutical production chains, and the collapse of the private led manufacture and distribution system, underlines the need for global scientific cooperation and health sovereignty, requiring scientific internationalization, national technological catching up and industrial policy actions on a national or regional basis. As the pandemic reveals a systemic failures of developed countries innovation systems, the weak coherence between scientific opportunities and manufacturing base in new biotechnology fields opens transitory and small windows of opportunity for developing countries. They can insert as early imitators at a lower cost than big pharma profiting from backwardness advantages. Given the knowledge thresholds achieved by local scientific base in molecular biology, the learning and R&D thresholds achieved by the actual public and private technological capabilities, and the productive experience in bioprocesses and in biosimilars, biotech companies in Argentina have a chance to continue an updated import substitution process and to face the challenges posed by the pandemic. This requires advances in three areas of intervention: i) The strengthening of scientific and technological opportunities in close cooperation with the international scientific community; ii) support for the accelerated generation of learning in manufacturing; and (iii) the strategic role of public procurement in enhancing local production of complex drugs, guiding scientific and technological developments to meet the needs of the public health system, and boosting public production of medicinesIn short, the COVID 19 challenge opens up the possibility (driven by the health crisis), of building strategic high-cost drug development and manufacturing capabilities for the public health system. This requires articulating a deliberate action of international North South and South-South scientific cooperation with existing actions and instruments into "big structuring projects" at a national scale.