INSTITUTIONAL EVOLUTION

From an institutional point of view, the ECLAMC program has been based at various centers in Argentina and Brazil, but always without a defined administrative link, as an independent research project. Starting in 1984, in order to broaden the capture of resources, the coordination was decentralized, keeping one base in Brazil (UFRJ = Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro) and another in Argentina, first at the Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Celular: IMBICE, La Plata, 1984-1991, and later at the Centro de Educación Médica e Investigaciones Clínicas: CEMIC, Buenos Aires, since 1992. Since 1987, the central headquarters of the coordination has been established at the Department of Genetics of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, in Rio de Janeiro.

REGIONAL EVOLUTION

From a regional perspective, ECLAMC began operating in 1967 as research limited to the city of Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, two years later it already included hospitals from different cities in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, which led to considering, during the program's first annual meeting in December 1969, the need for a suitable name, choosing the one it still has today: ECLAMC. In 1973, ECLAMC extended to seven Latin American countries: Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela in addition to the three already mentioned, and in 1990 to all ten countries of South America plus Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.

FUNCTIONAL EVOLUTION

The functional evolution of the ECLAMC program essentially maintains the same original experimental design from 1967. Nevertheless, some modifications were introduced, resulting from the experience accumulated by the program itself, as well as from the evolution of knowledge.