Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is a joint technology initiative, promoted by the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). This initiative supports collaborative research projects with the aim of improving the development of more effective and safer innovative medicines for patients.
According to this report, Spain ranks eighth in economic return and received 3.6% of the total budget with a contribution of 25.7 million Euros. In addition, the Spanish entities were involved in 28 of the 46 activities funded, leading one of them. Within this framework, IDIBAPS appears as the fourth of the 10 Spanish entities with more economic return of the IMI’s calls and it is the insstitution involved in the largest number of activities. The five projects in which IDIBAPS collaborates are:
1. DIRECT - Diabetes research on patient stratification (Jorge Ferrer).
2. AETIONOMY - Organising mechanistic knowledge about neurodegenerative diseases for theimprovement of drug development and therapy (José Luís Molinuevo/Lorena Rami).
3. PRECISESADS - Molecular reclassification to find clinically useful biomarkers for systemic autoimmune diseases (Ricard Cervera).
4. COMBACTE - Combatting Bacterial Resistance in Europe (Antoni Torres).
5. PHARMA-COG - Prediction of cognitive properties of new drug candidates for neurodegenerative diseases in early clinical development (David Bartres).
The first call for proposals under IMI-2 has been recently launched with funds from Horizon 2020, the European Commission’s framework programme for research and innovation that runs from 2014 to 2020. It is expected that Spanish entities will continue on participating and, therefore, improving the results obtained until now.
Report reference:
“Participación española en la Iniciativa de Medicamentos Innovadores (IMI). Resultados provisionales” CDTI, 2014.