Brazil Journal
Brazil Journal – 03/14/2025
Fernando Goldsztein and the search for a cure for his son's cancer: "I won't give up"
In 2015, Fernando Goldsztein experienced what no parent should ever go through: his son, Frederico, then 9 years old, was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor, group 4 medulloblastoma.
The journey in search of a cure, which included treatments in the United States and the pursuit of experimental therapies, led Goldsztein to create an unprecedented model for funding medical research, which became an international reference.
“I won’t give up until I change the world,” he said in this episode of The Business of Life. “Many people say, ‘I can imagine how hard it must be.’ I tell them: ‘no, you can’t imagine’.”
Goldsztein is a businessman in the construction industry from Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. He sold the family construction company to Cyrela and participated in the management of the new company.
But his life changed drastically with Frederico’s diagnosis. The inability to accept a prognosis without hope made him mobilize resources and contacts to boost research on childhood cancer.
This is how the Medulloblastoma Initiative (MBI) was born, an international research consortium that brings together 14 leading institutions, including universities in the USA, Canada, and Germany.
Unlike traditional models, where laboratories work alone, the MBI requires collaboration among scientific teams, eliminating redundancies and accelerating discoveries.
The result of this unprecedented model is concrete: in less than 3 years, two experimental treatments were approved by the FDA, the U.S. regulatory agency, including a therapeutic vaccine and an immunotherapy specifically for Frederico’s type of tumor.
“Life is not just about accumulating assets,” Goldsztein said in a lecture at MIT, where he presented the MBI model. “Everyone needs to find a purpose and use their resources, time, or knowledge to make the world a better place.”
The original article and the link to the podcast in Portuguese can be accessed here.
