On last May 21-22, the European Commission presented to the Competitiveness Council a formal proposal for creating the first two Joint Technology Initiatives (JTI), one of them being the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). It is expected that the consultation to the European Parliament and the final approval by the Competitiveness Council will happen during the second semester of 2007, in time for IMI to start work early in 2008. JTIs are a new instrument of the 7th Framework Programme. They will run as joint undertakings under article 171 of the EC treaty.
Innovative Medicines Initiative, a joint undertaking of the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) will support the development of new knowledge, tools and methods so that better and safer medicines can be made available more quickly. The IMI seeks to overcome research bottlenecks in the drug discovery and development process. Its vision is to create real European leadership in biomedical research and development and thereby reinvigorate the European biopharmaceuticals sector, making Europe a more attractive destination for private R&D investment in this sector.
The IMI will embody a new approach to research financing at the European level, bringing together public and private funds. The programme will have €2 billion to invest over seven years. The pharmaceutical companies will contribute with €1 billion by paying the totality of the cost of their participation in the projects, whilst the European Community contribution of other €1 billion will go entirely to SMEs and non-profit research institutions. The IMI will therefore contribute to increasing private investment in R&D, improving the knowledge transfer between European academic, clinical and industrial organisations.
IMI's goal is not the development of new medicines as such but the development of methods and tools that facilitate to bring new safe and effective medicines to market as quickly as possible. IMI’s strategic research agenda (SRA) is focused on four areas: improved predictivity of safety evaluation, improved predictivity of efficacy evaluation, knowledge management, and education and training (see http://www.imi-europe.org/).
If we look the SRA from our perspective as medicinal chemists, it is obvious that the chemical perspective of the pharmaceutical R&D has not been explicitly recognised as one of the IMI’s priority areas, maybe because chemistry is the central field for the competition between pharmaceutical companies and not a field for their cooperation as pretended in IMI. Nevertheless, a careful reading of the SRA offers interesting niches for making significant chemical contributions to the future projects. For instance, a better understanding of the disease mechanisms is one of the key issues of such agenda and the design of relevant chemical probes can be particularly useful for this purpose. On the other hand, the development of in silico methods for the pre-clinical prediction of drug safety, another key topic of the SRA, requires a clear chemical background.
In summary, in the next years we are going to see how IMI becomes a crucial initiative for setting priorities in pharmaceutical R&D and for funding collaborative projects in the area. In consequence, IMI deserves to be followed with pro-active attention by all the professionals involved in the drug discovery and development pipeline from both industry and academia.
By Ferran Sanz
