Testing COVID-19 in Brazil: fragmented efforts and challenges to expand diagnostic capacity at the Brazilian Unified National Health System.

Since the first recorded case of COVID-19 on February 26, 2020, Brazil has seen an exponential growth in the number of cases and deaths. The national testing approach has been insufficient to correctly use this tool in the support of containing the epidemic in the country. In this communication, we discuss efforts and challenges to scale-up COVID-19 testing at the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS).

Value regimes and pricing in the pharmaceutical industry: financial capital inflation (hepatitis C) versus innovation and production capital savings for malaria medicines.

The idea of this paper is to draw a parallel between two diametrically opposed political economies of medicine that coexist today. The first is embodied in the invention, appropriation, and distribution of antivirals for hepatitis C, particularly sofosbuvir, which was commercialized at an initial price of $85,000 in the United States, €56,000 in France, and $8000 in Brazil. These prices destabilized payers in both the North and the South.

Producing, controlling, and stabilizing Pasteur's anthrax vaccine: creating a new industry and a health market.

When Pasteur and Chamberland hastily set up their small biological industry to meet the agricultural demand for the anthrax vaccine, their methods for preparation and production had not yet been stabilized. The process of learning how to standardize biological products was accelerated in 1882 when vaccination accidents required the revision of production norms as the first hypotheses on fixity, inalterability, and transportability of vaccines were invalidated and replaced by procedures for continuous monitoring of the calibration of vaccines and the renewal of vaccine strains. Initially, the incompleteness and ongoing development of production standards justified Pasteur's monopoly on the production of the anthrax vaccine under his immediate supervision.

Appropriation and commercialization of the Pasteur anthrax vaccine.

Whereas Pasteur patented the biotechnological processes that he invented between 1857 and 1873 in the agro-food domain, he did not file any patents on the artificial vaccine preparation processes that he subsequently developed. This absence of patents can probably be explained by the 1844 patent law in France that established the non-patentable status of pharmaceutical preparations and remedies, including those for use in veterinary medicine. Despite the absence of patents, the commercial exploitation of the anthrax vaccine in the 1880s and 1890s led to a technical and commercial monopoly by Pasteur's laboratory as well as the founding of a commercial company to diffuse the vaccine abroad.

[Opposition to Myriad Genetics patents and their total or partial revocation in Europe: early conclusions].

The proceedings instituted against three European patents held by the US company Myriad Genetics, on the BRCA1 gene and the breast cancer diagnosis gene, resulted in the total or partial revocation of these patents. These decisions put an end to the legal monopoly claimed by Myriad Genetics on the BRCA1 gene and on breast cancer gene tests, and left the field open to European geneticists to develop and implement their test methods within the framework of a clinical not-for-profit organization. The opposition procedure, through which any actor is allowed to challenge European patents, was used by geneticists doctors in Europe to refuse the emergence of an industrial monopoly on a medical service offered in a clinical context.