An emphasis on the “native and national” has lately become a central theme in the political rhetoric of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). After projects for locally made tanks, warplanes and other weaponry, they are now calling for “national medicines.”

Turkey pays billions of dollars each year for imported medicines and medical devices as well as for the use of pharmaceutical patents and licenses, so the stated objective is a pharmaceutical drive in production and exports to keep all those billions at home. One of the main priorities to that effect is to lure expatriate Turkish scientists back to Turkey.

Aziz Sancar, professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and co-laureate of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is perhaps the first name that comes to mind. Other Turkish scientists are involved in disease research and the development of novel drugs and medical devices at a number of prestigious US institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Medical School, BioMed X Innovation Center, Brown University and Charles River Laboratories.

According to Ugur Terzioglu and Oguz Kalafat, chair and deputy chair of the American-Turkish Business Development Council, respectively, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim is personally keeping tabs on the national medicines project. Terzioglu and Kalafat have said that Turkey pays 25 billion Turkish lira ($6.5 billion) each year for pharmaceutical patents and licenses and estimate that at least $9 billion to $10 billion could be kept at home through the local production of drugs and molecules and subsequent exports.