RIO DE JANEIRO – With the participation of about 530 attendees, the second edition of BIO Latin America launched Thursday, bringing together biotech sector stakeholders to discuss opportunities in the sector that may be found and what barriers exist across the region.

“We have felt that in addition to the global convention that we hold every year, it is really necessary to take a deeper look into Latin America and drive deeper connections in Brazil and in Latin America and focus on relationships and companies,” said Joseph Damond, senior vice president of international affairs at BIO, during the opening ceremony.

The discussion that followed, about the bilateral relationship that exists between the U.S. and Brazil in the biotech space, ended with a look at the main barriers the Latin American giant has to deal with in terms of R&D and investment in the sector.

“From the regulatory perspective, there are some processes that take two or three years, and that is not attractive for companies,” said Juan Manuel Conde, Brazilian country head at Baxalta Inc., of Bannockburn, Ill., a biotech firm spun out from Baxter International. “Brazil is not attractive for clinical studies.”

But bureaucratic processes are not Conde´s and the industry’s main concern. There are different aspects, such as price caps and data access that also disturb the sector.

“Pricing in some of the countries are punitive. You can give access to research, but at the end, prices are punitive. There are some dynamics that have to be changed, because we bring innovation, new products to the market and we need a good environment to do that,” he said.

Conde´s comments were supported by other experts in the panel, such as Alan Vanderborght, CEO at Kybora Emerging Markets, a U.S.-based consulting firm providing support in M&A, licensing and commercialization to life science companies across the globe.

“It is key to establish true research and development in Brazil and free pricing for these [biotech] products for at least the duration of the patent,” said Vanderborght.

“The reason there is so much investment in the U.S. is because there is free pricing. You need to give return of investment to investors and if you don’t give them that opportunity, they will not invest. He added that controlling prices makes it very difficult to bring in partners to Brazil and Latin America.

And Vanderborght highlighted the momentum of the Brazilian economy to invest in the biotech sector, despite the turbulence of its markets in the past months and a deep political crisis hitting the Latin American country. “The fact of the tremendous devaluation of the Brazilian Real is a great opportunity to bring investment,” he said.

However, he warned that local companies are turning to the U.S. to invest, due to regulatory flaws in Brazil. “Brazilian companies are going to the U.S. to invest in research and development; they are building affiliates to invest in America in research and development, not in Brazil,” said Vanderborght. He called on Brazilian authorities to foster an environment of investment, “to allow the private sector to get return for their investment,” he said.

GROWING ITS EXPORTS

That environment of investment is also highly related to infrastructure, not only the physical one, but the regulatory one.

“Brazil has to grow the exports, and there are two types of infrastructure that are critical for this: physical and regulatory infrastructure,” said James Story, consul general of the U.S. in Rio de Janeiro.

Story remarked on the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and said Brazil should pay close attention to it, so it can grow its exports, since TPP is creating a whole set of new intellectual property and exports infrastructure in the world.

And simplification of processes is one of the aspects of the new regulatory infrastructure that stakeholders are expecting from countries like Brazil to introduce.

“[Aspects] related to taxation and import duties are complicated in Brazil,” said Kybora’s Vanderborght. “You need to find innovative ways to bring products into Brazil. We have to be creative to do business in Brazil, and maybe a simplification of these rules would make the market to grow faster,” he added.

“The opportunities are enormous, Brazil is always number one in what they [investors] are looking,” said Vanderborght. “The nature of the market makes it very attractive and that it is going to continue to be like that in the foreseeable future.”