Production and innovation

One of Fiocruz’s main missions is manufacturing strategic products for the Brazilian Unified Public Health System (SUS). With one of the largest public pharmaceutical laboratories in the country - the Drug Technology Institute (Farmanguinhos) - Fiocruz contributes with nearly 40% of the drug purchased by the Ministry of Health from official laboratories, but accounts for only 5% of these expenditures. Farmanguinhos generates savings to the public coffers, especially because it masters production technologies for drugs used in AIDS treatment, allowing the government to regulate prices charged by other laboratories and even to determine compulsory licensing of  medicines, as occurred with Efavirenz, an antiretroviral.

Fiocruz has also one of Brazil’s largest public laboratories for vaccine production: the Immunobiological Technology Institute (Biomanguinhos), which manufactured nearly 130 million doses in 2008. Biomanguinhos is the world’s largest manufacturer of the vaccine against yellow fever, and the only Latin American laboratory certified by the World Health Organization (WHO) for this purpose. It also manufactures vaccines against polio, meningitis A and C, MMR, monovalent Hib and Hib+DTP. As of 2007, the latter started to be produced using 100% Brazilian technology. In addition to vaccines, Biomanguinhos annually produces about six million reagents for diagnosis of HIV-1, HIV-1 / 2, Chagas’ disease, dengue fever, leishmaniasis and leptospirosis.