Tuesday 22 September 2009
The European Commission’s research partnership with industry aimed at finding new ways of making drug development more efficient is preparing to launch a new series of projects valued at €156.3 million.
Called the Innovative Medicines Initiative, the partnership is between the Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (Efpia). It was set up in 2007 to enable industry, academic institutions and others to work together on a non-competitive basis to solve specific problems in the area of biomedical research. The deadline for applications for the new projects is January 2010.
The following is a list of the topics for which proposals are being solicited:
- New tools for target validation to improve drug efficacy (oncology). This project aims to reduce the failure rate of anti-cancer therapies by developing novel models for target validation. Historically targets have been inappropriately selected or validated due to the use of reductionist models which do not represent the complexity of tumours in situ, and which lead to failure in a clinical setting.
- Molecular biomarkers –accelerating cancer therapy development and refining patient cure. This project aims to identify biomarkers which will assist in the understanding of the variable composition of tumours and their equally variable response to treatment. This will be helpful in monitoring both therapeutic efficacy and the early detection of side effects in treatments given for breast, lung, colon, prostate and ovarian cancers.
- Imaging biomarkers for anti-cancer drug development. This project aims to further develop and validate novel imaging biomarkers to be used in early tumour diagnosis and the monitoring of therapeutic efficacy. This will show drug developers quickly whether new drugs are effective or not.
- Identification and development of rapid point of care diagnostic tests for bacterial diagnosis to facilitate conduct of clinical trials and clinical practice. This project aims to accelerate the development of better, cost effective and rapid diagnostic tests for infectious diseases. These include community and hospital infections, lower respiratory tract infections, including pneumonia and tuberculosis.
- Understanding aberrant adaptive immunity mechanisms in chronic immune-mediated diseases. This project aims to develop new targets and biomarkers for testing drug efficacy and safety for patients affected by rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and inflammatory bowel syndrome.
- Translational research in chronic immune-mediated disease: bridging between animal models and humans. This project aims to develop predictive models and commonly accepted disease biomarkers that translate from animal models to patients affected by rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and RA-like diseases.
- Drug/disease modelling: library and framework. This project aims to develop data standards and a library and framework to effectively allow industry, academia and regulatory authorities to evaluate the efficacy and safety of new medicines.
- Open pharmacological space. This project aims to develop a unified public domain informatics infrastructure to support drug discovery and development both in industry and academia, and
- Electronic health records. This project aims to develop a platform to share health record data from different healthcare institutions in Europe to accelerate the drug development process.
Altogether, the Innovative Medicines Initiative is allocating €2 billion to biomedical research over the period 2008 to 2017. Half of this amount is a cash contribution from the Commission and half is an in-kind contribution from Efpia.
The first set of projects, which were approved in May 2009, received €246 million, of which €110 million represented an allocation from the Commission and €136 million of in-kind contributions from Efpia.
The upcoming allocation of €156.3 million includes €76.8 million from the Commission and €79.5 million from Efpia.
For more information on the IMI, please see http://imi.europa.eu and http://www.imi-europe.org.
Copyright 2009 Evernow Publishing Ltd
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