HEALTH-SCIENCE: Argentine Scientists Lack Finance

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 13 1997 (IPS) - A group of Argentine scientists, who successfully managed to eliminate skin cancer from laboratory mice, now have difficulties in financing further research.

Biologist Osvaldo Podhajcer, explained how his team had successfully suppressed the production of a protein known as Sparc in the mice which is associated with invasive malignant tumors such as melanoma. They did this by modifying the gene that generates this Sparc in laboratory experiements last year.

“Until now, it had been possible to stop the multiplication of carcinogenic cells, but this is the first time that a total elimination of the tumor has been achieved by gene therapy,” Podhajcer told IPS.

The therapeutic use of this gene therapy was patented by a British company, in association with private Argentine foundations and the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet). No Argentine commercial laboratory took an interest in financing a patent to protect the discovery.

Podhajcer said, “We needed about 10,000 dollars to begin the patent process and to pay lawyers’ fees.”

Having become interested in the research, a British company whose name is being kept secret at the request of the researchers, put money and lawyers at the disposal of the Argentines.

The discovery was published in the prestigious American magazine “Nature Medicine” latre last year. Podhajcer said that following publication, his research team discovered that the tumor disappears because of an immune response in the mouse that is activated through incorporation of an altered gene which halts the production of Sparc.

Editors of the magazine described the work as an “exciting” discovery for treating skin cancer, that might also be therapeutic for liver, breast, colon and lung cancers.

In Podhajcer’s experiment, melanoma tumor cells that had been injected into mice underwent reduced capability to invade healthy cells – a process known as metastasis – and often disappeared from the mice in a week’s time.

Now the research team is looking for funds for new experiments that will permit the commencement of clinical trials in humans in within two years.

To do this they need to find the best vector for introducing the therapeutic gene into the cancerous cells. This transport mechanism could be a virus from which the pathogenic genes have been extracted, or, it could be a tumor cell itself which would then be combined with the modified gene.

But, once again, no Argentine private enterprise is willing to finance continuation of the project. Podhajcer has visited many Argentine labs in a fruitless search of partners who would supply between 70,000 dollars and 100,000.

His problems underlined the low priority given scientifice research in Argentina.

Podhajcer’s low-budget research team began its work three years ago at the Institute for Biochemical Research, a project of the Campomar Foundation. Some members of this team receive salaries or scholarships from Conicet while other researchers are subsidized by private foundations.

The first author of the study, Fernanda Ledda, receives 650 dollars a month as a scholarship from Conicet. As a professor, she has little opportunity to improve her financial status. Twenty-nine- year old Ledda told IPS: “Write in your article that as chief of experimental works at the University of Buenos Aire I earn 90 dollars per month.”

The study’s second author, Soraya Agris, a 25-year-old biology student, collects 450 dollars each month from the private Sales Foundation. Three other scientists from Campomar, and two Argentines from other institutions worked on the project, one of them from the Kennedy Rheumatology Clinic in London.

The sums that Ledda and Agris receive each month amount to half the amount needed for the subsistence needs of a family, according to figures from the National Institute for Statistics which sets the family poverty line at 1,000 dollars.

The salaries received by Argentine researchers are equivalent to those earned by maids and unskilled construction workers. Podhajcer earns the most. As a full-time researcher for Conicet, the 42-year-old scientist earns 1,500 dollars per month from his work with the Campomar Foundation.

In Argentina, the portion of the national budget dedicated to research is 0.2 percent of the gross national product, a percentage that is quadrupled in nearby Brazil.

Many researchers migrate to more highly developed countries in search of better training but also to increase their earning power. However, after a few years, they return to Argentina to have another try.

This is what happened to Podhajcer. “I took my doctorate here, and then went to Israel for a masters program. Subsequently, I worked in Great Britain and France, where I undertook my current line of work, but I wanted to come back to Argentina for my family’s sake, most especially for my daughters. I wanted them to be raised here …. now they want to go overseas to study!”