Is anything up-to-date in Fidel Castros Cuba? A quick look around this island nation of 11 million people says no. The Gap and McDonalds are conspicuously absent, virtually every American car and truck is a 1940s or 50s model, and at the Tropicana, Havanas huge outdoor nightclub, everything except the prices recalls that era, too.
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The answeran emphatic yesappears to be the result, albeit unintended, of the economic embargo the United States imposed on Cuba in October 1960 and has yet to lift. At least so a group of American journalists was told on a recent visit to the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (Spanish acronym CIGB). The center is a part of a complex of 38 life sciences facilities and support structures called the Western Scientific Pole in Havana. (Cuba has 14 scientific poles; this one is the most eminent.)
"If it werent for the embargo," said Jorge V. Gavilondo, Ph.D., a CIGB molecular immunologist, "probably none of this would have been built."
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Biotechnology did not, of course, exist when the embargo began. But what did exist, Gavilondo pointed out, was the Castro governments belief that scienceparticularly biological sciencewould improve the health of the population and the countrys prospects for sound socioeconomic development. It was therefore decided to establish a National Center for Scientific Research (Spanish acronym CNIC).
CNIC, which opened in 1965 and is now a part of the Western Scientific Pole, counts among its many attainments a genetically engineered cholera vaccine, a cholesterol-lowering drug derived from sugar cane, bone implants for reconstructive surgery that are made from coral, and more.
Its initial mission, however, was primarily educational. Not all of Cubas more than 11,000 career scientists got their professional training at CNIC, Gavilondo told his visitors. But many, including himself, did.
Gavilondo went on to say that a "closed-cycle strategy" for each project (funding is determined by national need and peer review) is a defining feature of Cuban biotechnology, partly because it is wholly state-owned. (Some aspects of the countrys economy no longer are.) But another reason is that Cuban-style biotechnology encompasses everything from conceptualization and in vitro and animal studies through to clinical trials, commercialization, and post-marketing follow-up.
Thus most R&D centersCNIC and CIGB includednot only have laboratories, but also their own production plants and marketing arms for purposes both of domestic distribution and export. However, the R&D centers do consult each other and collaborate and share resources.
The National Center for the Production of Laboratory Animals, for example, serves virtually all of Cubas biomedical communityeven providing it with mouse ascites fluid for monoclonal antibody work and facilities for studies with germ-free animals. And there is similarly a facilitynamed the Center for Immunoassaythat specializes in developing and producing computer software and laboratory instruments as well as making diagnostic reagents and kits.
Two other parts of the shared infrastructure are a Coordinating Center for Clinical Trials and a National Biopreparations Center, where quantities of vaccines and other biologic products are made in accordance with World Health Organization and other international quality control criteria. Agencies for the regulation of drugs, vaccines, medical devices, and clinical laboratory practices are in the picture, too.
Birth of an Industry
The seeds for much of this were sown in 1980 when the late R. Lee Clark, M.D., then president emeritus of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and at one time president of the American Cancer Society, visited Havana. In those days, leukocyte interferona byproduct of infection that occurs naturally in white blood cellswas much in the news as a potential cancer cure. Clark, after discussing it with President Castro, arranged for a small team of Cuban scientists to go to Finland to learn how to obtain leukocyte interferon from human blood. (Interferon is species-specific.)
When, upon returning to Havana, the scientists set up a makeshift laboratory in a small house and succeeded in producing the protein in 6 weeks flat, a real research facilitythe Center for Biological Researchwas their reward. Begun in 1981 and finished the next year, it was folded into the CIGB when that facility opened in 1986. By that time, however, it was apparent that it was far more efficient to produce interferon recombinantly than by extracting it from blood, so in Cuba, as elsewhere, it was being made the genetic engineering way.
Also in 1981, the Castro government began to step up its "biotechnology initiative." Despite the harder times that arrived in the 1990s with the loss of economic subsidies from the former Soviet Union and a tightening of the U.S. embargo, about 1% of the countrys gross national product has been spent on the endeavor ever since. So far, that has come to more than US $1 billion.
What does Cuba have to show for this investment? In the next issue, the News looks at several compounds being developed in Cuban laboratories, biotechnologys role in Cuban commerce, and details of a clinical trial of a Cuban vaccine.
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