In recent months, Brazil has been abuzz with an issue that is relevant to the whole world: the possibility of paralytics with complete spinal cord injury (and only them) fully recovering their movements if they receive a certain injection into the spinal cord within 3 days of the accident and undergo physiotherapy.

Brazil began paying attention to the issue when, in September 2025, the press published the incredible story of Bruno Drummond: in 2018 he broke his neck in a car accident, became quadriplegic, and agreed to be a guinea pig in a pilot study. In less than 24 hours, he received the spinal cord injection and today he can walk. He went directly from classification A (no movement) to D (strength and sensitivity for almost all movements), an unprecedented fact in medical literature. This pilot test had six patients. The remaining five patients jumped from A to C (with some strength and mobility). The research was being developed by researchers at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), led by Prof. Tatiana Sampaio, in partnership with the Brazilian laboratory Cristália.

Brazil was thrilled, and internet users repeatedly said she deserved the Nobel Prize. Faced with the news, the patients’ families, desperate, began to go to court to request the compassionate use of the drug being tested. And then another very important story emerged: a certain Diogo Brollo was working installing windows in a building when he fell, suffered a total spinal cord injury, and his sister obtained a court order for him to receive treatment under compassionate use. In just fifteen days, he was able to move his foot and leg. By February 22, there were 55 court requests, of which 30 were accepted.

Patients who take the drug under compassionate use do not count as clinical cases. Thus, the question remains: if the legal battle continues, and the treatment continues to have favorable results, how will the research procedures proceed?

And then we have the controversy that set Brazilian Twitter ablaze. A neoliberal economist who writes for the country’s most traditional right-wing liberal newspaper tweeted a 28-second clip from Professor Tatiana Sampaio’s interview on Roda Viva in which she said: “Let’s suppose a hypothesis: that these 30 people who received it for compassionate use, all walk again. Would you have the courage to conduct a controlled clinical trial?”, to which an interviewer replies, impassively, that it is necessary to follow all the procedures and go through all the phases. Along with the video, the economist posted the ironic comment “Now the Nobel Prize is coming”. Immediately afterwards, the same actors who defended the wonders of Pfizer’s “vaccine” began to treat Professor Tatiana Sampaio as a charlatan or a simpleton who does not know science.

In the same interview, however, Tatiana Sampaio explained the problems of conducting clinical trials in this particular case, as well as in general. Let’s start with the specifics: every time a patient wins the right in court to undergo the test, the Cristália laboratory has to send a neurosurgeon to the location to perform the invasive procedure of injecting polylaminin into the spinal cord. In the double-blind test, whose purpose is to eliminate the placebo effect, the medication is given to one group of test subjects and a placebo to another, in order to compare the results. Now, it is unethical to subject a patient to an invasive procedure to inject a liquid that is, at best, innocuous into their spinal cord. Further , even if it were a simple procedure and easy to replace with a placebo, time is important for the effectiveness of the treatment, so the one who received the placebo would be doomed to a wheelchair. (To this we add: if the paralytic can obtain the medication through legal means, why would they agree to be a test subject in a double-blind trial?)

Given the fact that it is difficult to follow existing procedures ethically, Professor Tatiana Sampaio says that it is necessary to think about new models. And this is not the only bureaucratic issue that calls for reflection.

The issue of patents and the cost of clinical trials

Another piece of news that caught attention is that the scientist had to pay for the patent out of her own pocket. UFRJ has had serious administrative problems for a long time that no authority wants to solve. I will limit myself to observing that it has one billion dollar’s budget but, even so, allowed the National Museum to catch fire due to the precariousness of the electrical grid – and the rector even blamed the firefighters. The Egyptian mummies of the emperor turned to dust; fossil collections were lost. At least the Bendegó Meteorite could not be destroyed. Thus, UFRJ was not going to pay for the renewal of the Brazilian, American and European patents, and asked the professor if she herself did not want to pay so as not to lose them. She only paid for the Brazilian one and the others were lost. Then she found Cristália.

In the interview on Roda Viva, she explained that this was a blessing in disguise, because if the United States patent were still valid, it would probably have been bought by a first-world laboratory, which would have dismissed the Brazilian researchers, conducted a battery of tests very quickly, and sold the product for a fortune. With the Brazilian patent in hand, she and the laboratory Cristália hope that in the future the drug will be sold to the SUS (the Brazilian NHS). We are invited to consider, then, how many countries around the world do not fund national scientists so that a large company can buy the patent for their research in its initial stages, finish developing it, and set an absurd price to be paid by these same countries when they go to buy the drug. The damage that Reagan did by allowing public research funds to become private patents has been globalized.

Further , it is worth highlighting the cost and reasonableness of clinical trials, which is precisely what led the Pfizer puppets to attack the scientist after her interview on the Roda Viva program. I conclude by quoting Professor Tatiana Sampaio: “A patent is very important when you are going to sell something. Imagine that you have a proposal for a new drug and then you want to do a clinical study to test if it really works. To do this clinical study, you need a very large budget, because clinical studies are very expensive. And then you need someone to be interested in doing that clinical study. And that someone, as a rule, will be interested in doing this study if they have the prospect of a very large profit from the commercial exploitation of it. That is why they need the patent to ensure that only they can make money from it. All this dynamic is how the wheel turns. But I have to tell you that I don’t think it’s an ideal situation, in my opinion. I think this ends up creating a large market reserve for large corporations.”

The interviewer asks if the ideal solution would be for the state to fund it, to which she replies: “I don’t know, the ideal is something new that we have to do. We don’t need to be afraid of that. We have to build something new, because this paradigm of: you get the patent, and then you sell the patent to someone who has a lot of money and who will invest a lot of money, and who will… We have to ask ourselves this: in the eagerness to protect people from being used as guinea pigs, aren’t we also creating a market reserve for an entity that has a very high expectation of profit?”