Daniel Zequeto, Founder of ODC Life Sciences, shared on LinkedIn:
“Brazil has moved from 18th to 12th globally in initiated clinical trials.
Maintaining that position will take more than a cost advantage.
A recent Fierce Biotech article placed Brazil alongside Abu Dhabi and South Korea as regions competing for a larger role in the future of biotech, highlighting our population diversity, universal healthcare system, scientific talent, and emerging genomic infrastructure.
The article points to companies helping build that foundation: Vesper Biotechnologies, turning Brazilian academic science into biotech ventures, and gen-t, building genomic and phenotypic infrastructure for Brazil’s highly diverse population.
That layer matters. But assets and datasets do not become medicines on their own.
Someone has to deliver the regulatory and ethics approvals, activate the sites, engage the investigators, identify the patients, and randomize them on schedule.
That is where the region is won or lost: in the handoffs.
- Regulatory to ethics
- Ethics to site activation
- Site activation to first patient in
- Patient identification to randomization
- When those handoffs are owned, LATAM stops behaving like a secondary geography.
3 Programs Where ODC Life Sciences Led Patient Identification / Recruitment in LATAM:
In a Phase III rare disease program: A retrospective review of pathology archives with a centralized diagnostic partner identified more than 230 potential patients across Latin America. The region delivered approximately 20% of global enrollment, with Brazil ranking second worldwide – behind only the United States.
In a global Phase III hematology program: Brazil was added later to accelerate enrollment. With 9.2% of subject-contributing sites, the country delivered 12.8% of global randomizations – 3.47 patients per site against a global benchmark of 2.50, with a 63.4% screen-to-randomization rate.
In a Phase III biomarker-selected oncology trial: Brazil generated approximately 21% of global prescreenings and tied with the United States and France as the top enrolling country.
Across more than 50 trials over nine years, approximately 90% of the programs where ODC led recruitment met their agreed enrollment targets.
Brazil’s advantage will not be built on cost. It will be built on integration, speed, trust, and the ability to execute.
At ODC Life Sciences, this is the work: connecting regulators, ethics committees, research sites, investigators, referring physicians, and patients so that trials do not just open in LATAM, they deliver from it.
Innovation upstream. Execution downstream. The region needs both.
What do you see as the greatest barrier keeping Latin America from capturing a larger share of global clinical development today?”