Perspectives in Health Magazine
The Magazine of the Pan American Health Organization
Special Centennial Edition
Volume 7, Number 2, 2002

When the history of the life sciences revolution is written--sometime later this century--will Latin American and Caribbean countries figure as central characters in the narrative or be relegated to the footnotes? The experience of Brazil suggests that the Region need not be shut out if countries make a concerted effort to invest in R&D. Brazil in fact has already secured itself a world-class leadership role in the field of genomics. Researchers from a São Paulo consortium became the first in the world, in July 2000, to decode the genome of a plant pathogen, Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterium that infects citrus plants. Soon after, members of the same group announced they had successfully mapped some 800,000 human expressed sequence tags (ESTs) small pieces of DNA sequence in malignant tumors.

In 2001, scientists at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) became the first in the developing world to successfully clone an animal, a calf named Vitoria. Earlier this year, Brazilian researchers successfully sequenced the genomes of two bacteria of the genus Xanthomonas that cause citrus canker and produce substantial economical losses around the world.

Most of these successes can be traced to an initiative of the State of São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) launched in 1997, which created a "virtual genomics institute" linking laboratories and researchers across the state. Initially the network--called the Organization for Nucleotide Sequencing and Analysis, or ONSA--linked some 200 sci-entists working in 30 research laboratories. By now, it has expanded to about 400 researchers and 60 labs.

Seed financing for the project came from FAPESP itself, which by law is guaranteed 1 percent of São Paulo's state tax revenues. Funds have also come from the Brazilian citrus growers' association, the Swiss-based Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, and Brazilian sugar growers (for a project to sequence the sugarcane genome), as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and California winegrowers, who contracted ONSA researchers to sequence a strain of Xylella fastidiosa that has wreaked havoc on California vineyards. Recent developments include the expansion of Brazil's cancer genome efforts into a "clinical genome project" focusing on gene expression and its correlation with clinical evolution, therapeutic response and survival in cancer patients. Also in its final phase is a project to sequence ESTs from the parasite Schistosoma, a major cause of illness in South America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East.

All these successes have boosted the confidence of Brazilian scientists and strengthened this model for organizing collaborative research in the country, says Dr. Marco A. Zago, professor of clinical medicine at the University of São Paulo and an ONSA affiliate. "Obviously this way of using the available resources and distributing acquired competency more efficiently should interest other countries," says Zago, "especially developing countries that need to make the most of their scarce resources."