By Mari Cleide Sogayar, Ph.D. and Antonio Carlos Campos de Carvalho, M.D., Ph.D.

A national Review Board system, increasing research activity and the prospect of treating chronic and degenerative diseases using cell therapy, is led the Brazilian Government to strongly support stem cell research in Brazil. Two rounds of Requests for Applications (RFAs) have been funded by the Science and Technology Department of the Ministry of Health in collaboration with the National Research Council (CNPq), with more than 100 projects being funded since 2005. The last RFA funded 52 projects, mostly in basic and pre-clinical research. In addition, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Bank for Social and Economic Development funded eight Cell Technology Centers (CTCs) in order to generate, isolate and expand human stem cells under cGMP conditions, namely: embryonic stem cells (ESC), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), neural stem cells (NSC), and cardiac progenitor cells (CPC). These groups constituted the Brazilian Cell Therapy Network (www.rntc.org.br), established to promote interaction among the research laboratories and, also, with growing industry in regenerative medicine. Around US$50 million have been disbursed to the Network by the government between 2005 and 2010.