In line with the recommendations of the strategic research agenda for the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a first call for proposals for research projects in the areas of brain disorders, metabolic and inflammatory diseases was launched on 30 April 2008. Some €123 million will be granted to the most promising research projects in these areas later this year. In the future, IMI calls will also cover cancer and infectious diseases.
The IMI, a public-private partnership between the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), will fund research into these five fields of diseases with some €2 billion over the next five years. The aim is to address current long delays or bottlenecks in the pharmaceutical R&D process.
The identified bottlenecks for which better tools are required to speed up the discovery and development of new drugs are:
- Safety evaluation: speeding up identification of new products with the best benefit–risk ratios and a greater likelihood of success;
- Prediction of efficacy: the development of biomarkers that can be used as tools to understand the biology of a disease and the effects of a new pharmaceutical compound;
- Knowledge management: supporting safety and efficacy of projects as well as information sharing, modelling and simulation tasks, and;
- Gaps in education and training: supporting the medicine development process.
Projects involving a variety of stakeholders - academia, research centres, SMEs, patient groups, public authorities and competitors in the research-based pharmaceutical industry - will thus be funded on these issues up to 2013 to improve the drug development process for new medicines for cancer and brain disorders and inflammatory, metabolic and infectious diseases.
The initiative also foresees the establishment by 2013 of a European Medicines Research Academy (EMRA), "a pan-European platform for educating and training current and future professionals involved in biomedical R&D, including regulatory officers".
