Maria do Céu Patrão Neves, coordinator of the CT-Luso project, was interviewed for the Viva Saúde program, on RTP Africa, a specialized health program aimed at Portuguese-speaking African countries.
In this interview, conducted by presenter Vânia Vaz, Maria do Céu Patrão Neves began by highlighting the long journey still to be covered in terms of clinical trials in Portuguese-speaking countries.
“The CT-Luso project, which is now starting, had as its predecessor the BERC-Luso project. At BERC-Luso we have already made a lot of progresses: we carried out a comparative legislative study, we were able to identify in the 5 Portuguese-speaking African countries which were the omitted parts in the legislation that needed to be addressed, we identified at the level of institutions which were missing and needed to be created and we gave professional training for the various people involved in the evaluation of clinical trials. There has been a lot of work done, but there is still a lot more to do.”
Maria do Céu Patrão Neves explained that this training project operates in three dimensions – legal, institutional and professional – and aims to increase the attractiveness of Portuguese-speaking countries for the international pharmaceutical industry. It will also bring both economic and social benefits, such as the creation of services, strengthening the scientific community and reducing brain drain.
“This project aims to create the necessary conditions for clinical trials to be carried out in these countries, so that the benefits remain in these countries and in a way that makes them attractive to the international pharmaceutical industry.”
He highlighted that Mozambique is at the forefront of biomedical research on topics such as malaria and added that “whether malaria, other diseases such as dengue fever, tuberculosis, or other public health problems other than infectious diseases such as, for example, child malnutrition, premature pregnancy, the death of pregnant women - which is 130x higher in Africa compared to Western countries - all of these aspects can benefit from biomedical research.”
Patrão Neves also emphasized the exceptional conditions of the African continent: “Africa presents itself to the pharmaceutical industry as an extraordinarily attractive continent - it has a very young population and is a population that has not yet participated in many clinical trials, has pathologies different from the rest of the world."
This partnership now celebrated between these 6 countries (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Portugal), will allow for “legislative harmonization” and “harmonization of procedures”, thus enabling a “bureaucratic economy”. The consensus on a single clinical trial protocol, without lowering safety and ethical-legal requirements, could place Portuguese-speaking countries on an equal footing with Anglo-Saxon or Francophone countries which, due to language issues, tend to be favored in carrying out of clinical trials.
In the final notes, she said that “the pharmaceutical industry prefers countries with strict, clear and rigorous norms, because this also puts its investment at risk. It would be a mistake to move towards facilitists and simplifying solutions as a means of attracting the pharmaceutical industry. This is the wrong way. The right path is a robust legislation and clear requirements.”
The full interview is available here.
