Pan-European Innovative Medicines Initiative sees further progress

The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations says that the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a pan-European public and private sector collaboration between various health stakeholders (including patient organizations), has published a new version of its Strategic Research Agenda (SRA). This recommends the setting up of a European Medicines Research Academy to fill in the gaps the IMI has identified within medicines development education and training.

The EFPIA explains that the IMI aims to boost Europe's biomedical R&D base, correcting the relative under-funding of this sector in the region compared to other parts of the world.

The IMI, launched in 2004, is intended to support faster discovery and development of more effective innovative medicines with fewer side effects. Its new SRA identifies predicting safety (early safety evaluation), predicting efficacy (better understanding of the clinical basis of diseases), bridging the gaps in knowledge management (lack of data pooling and processing infrastructure) and in education and training as the main bottlenecks in the current biomedical R&D process. The SRA describes a number of recommendations to address these problems and states that the IMI is set to implement "innovative patient centered projects" to address these issues.