Hugo Sigman is going to produce the Latin American vaccine. Without expecting it, the Argentine businessman is in the heat of battle against the coronavirus: one of its factories will manufacture in Buenos Aires, for the entire continent, the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Sigman, a doctor, psychiatrist, biotech mogul, producer of blockbuster movies and editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in the Southern Cone, is reunited in the “vaccine operation” with an old friend, the Mexican magnate Carlos Slim. "All this," he says, "arises from agreements between private companies."
Hugo Sigman of half a century ago, a member of the Argentine Communist Party, would have thought “all this” bad. "Science in our country was highly ideological and I was part of that sector that did not want to know anything about the private sector," he explains in a videoconference from Madrid, where he resides most of the year. He was born in Buenos Aires on January 1, 1944, received his doctorate in Medicine in 1969 and later specialized in psychiatry. In 1976, when the military coup occurred, he fled to Spain and found work at the Hospital Clínico de Barcelona. Shortly afterwards, he founded the Chemo company with his wife, Silvia Gold, a doctor in Biochemistry, with $ 400,000 on loan from his father-in-law. It was the origin of the Insud Group.
On February 20, President Alberto Fernández inaugurated in Garín, near the city of Buenos Aires, a factory of the company mAbxience, a subsidiary of Grupo Insud. Their goal was to produce monoclonal antibodies for cancer treatments. Nobody gave much importance to the matter. And nobody, not even Hugo Sigman, guessed that the Garín factory was going to become a key piece in a negotiation of enormous importance.
By then, covid-19 was beginning to spread throughout the world. On March 11, 2020, three weeks after the inauguration of the Argentine mAbxience plant, the World Health Organization classified the disease as a pandemic. "The University of Oxford has been working for years with a vaccine model obtained from the cloning of a particular type of chimpanzee adenovirus," explains Sigman, which is why it had a long way to go to develop a vaccine against covid-19. London-based pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca contacted Oxford.
“I don't know the details of the contract between AstraZeneca and Oxford,” says Sigman, “but as far as I know AstraZeneca decided that, as long as the pandemic lasted, it would sell the vaccine without profit and make a universal supply, ensuring at least 20% of the needs of each country ”. There was another detail: AstraZeneca promised to start manufacturing when the vaccine was still in phase 3, testing, to save time; the risk was that if the vaccine did not pass that stage, it would have to destroy what was already manufactured.
AstraZeneca sought out philanthropists willing to bear the huge costs of production. “He found them in the United States, Europe, India, China, but Latin America was missing. Through the Gates Foundation they connected with Carlos Slim, who was willing to contribute the money [the sum has not been made public] on the condition that the vaccine for Latin America be manufactured in the continent itself, ”continues the Argentine businessman. The chosen factory was that of the Insud Group together with Buenos Aires. That's where Hugo Sigman enters the operation. "We had the appropriate facilities, we had the necessary industrial experience and we also offered something important: to suspend other productions to avoid the danger of cross contamination", says Sigman, who states that the decision did not correspond to his friend Slim, but to AstraZeneca, and it arose from "agreements between private companies, without government intervention."
“The mechanism will be as follows: we will manufacture the active ingredient of the vaccine, we will sell it to AstraZeneca and it will deliver the product to the Mexican company Liomont, which will package it and return it to AstraZeneca, so that the pharmaceutical company can commercialize it. on the continent, ”Sigman says. The final price of the vaccine for Latin America will be much lower than that of other vaccines.
The Argentine paradox
The choice of an Argentine company as a continental production center reflects one of the country's paradoxes: high scientific level, serious economic difficulties. “The Argentine biotechnology industry has a very long history and the fact that it did not become a global success is not due, I think, to technical reasons, but to a lack of predictability. There are no stable economic, fiscal or tariff policies, and thus long-term projects cannot be financed ”, laments the businessman. mAbxience has a plant in León (Spain) "and without it it would have been almost impossible for us to tackle this project," he says. "What I can honestly say is that the Argentine scientific level is very high, proof of this is that two directors of the Spanish plant are Argentine", he indicates.
Hundreds of young Argentine scientists are now leaving the country or considering doing so, due to economic problems and difficulties in research. Hugo Sigman founded and chaired the Argentine Chamber of Biotechnology, which groups together industries from sectors such as pharmacy, veterinary medicine, food, diagnostics or forestry (the Insud Group has a presence in all of them), and promoted a system of aid . “Five companies each contributed $ 250,000 and we chose five projects from a list of 300 to facilitate their conversion into a business. Today there are already 21 start-ups , six of which receive foreign investment and 13 of which were founded by women ”, he explains. "Despite everything, there is still scientific talent in the country."
Sigman and his wife no longer directly manage the Insud Group. Two of his children, the oldest and the youngest, take care of it. The middle man is a physicist and works in neuroscience. “Family businesses require discipline and you know you shouldn't get involved in your children's work, but sometimes I do it and, of course, they reproach me,” smiles Sigman, who says he has a lot of fun “with other things”. Like the film production company she founded with her friend Óscar Kramer, now deceased. K&S, the cinematographic society, collaborates with El Deseo, the production company of the Almodóvar brothers, and is behind Argentine hits such as El clan, Relatos savages or, more recently, La odisea de los giles .
Among the “other things” there is also the publishing house Capital Intellectual and the publication of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish for the Southern Cone. “I never gave up my convictions,” Sigman says, “I still believe that the world can be better. What I changed was the method to achieve it, because when I was young I believed that the State should solve everything and when I started traveling I realized that this was not realistic: I saw the economic failure of the socialist countries ”. In Spain, he says, he became a social democrat.
Information about the coronavirus
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- Guide to action against the disease
- In case of symptoms, these are the phones that have been enabled in each Latin American country.