Core Facility for Supporting Research and Technological Development in Health: A Review of Its Concept and the Brazilian Context.

Core facilities are important infrastructures that support scientific research, technological development, and innovation in health. Their concept has evolved in recent decades, incorporating new characteristics and functionalities that highlight their importance in scientific field. In Brazil, these units gained relevance in the late 1990s, accompanying the expansion of science, technology, and innovation policies in health. The objective of this study was to investigate the concepts of core facilities present in the literature, understand their insertion in Brazilian context, propose categories of conceptual analysis for core facilities, and define a concept that encompasses the main characteristics of these multiuser research support units. To this end, an analytical review was conducted through an extensive search for documents published between 1990 and 2024, involving scientific articles, technical-managerial documents, and research funding notices. The various definitions of core facility were evaluated, their main characteristics mapped, the Brazilian context assessed, eight categories of conceptual analysis identified and described, and, based on these, a new concept for these structures proposed. The results contribute to scientific literature and may be valuable for both researchers and science and technology managers in understanding their scope of action, in inferring their impact on biomedical sciences, and in building a management model appropriate for core facilities that support scientific research in the health field.