European Commission R&D Initiatives Committee (ECIC)
The Innovative Initiative continues its long bureaucratic trip towards the creation of the Joint Technology Initiative (the autonomous IMI managing institution). It is currently under the consideration of the European Parliament and was approved by the Innovation European Council of Ministers in November. A key issue that is at the centre of the current negotiations (between the member states, the Commission and EFPIA) is about the procedures of the project calls. The headquarters of IMI will be located in Brussels. It is expected that the first IMI calls will be published by the beginning of next year. It seems that Safety and Efficacy will be the IMI pillars considered in the first call. The other two (Knowledge Management and Education & Training) will be considered in future calls.
Beyond IMI and within the FP7 Cooperation Programme, the HEALTH calls include topics related drug discovery. Regarding the FP7 Capacities Programme, there is an initiative for creating a European-wide infrastructure supporting the chemical biology and drug discovery research. It would include tools for the visibility of and access to chemical diversity generated by academic groups, as well as platforms for the biological screening of the academic libraries. To some extend, it would a European extension of the German initiative ChemBioNet (www.chembionet.de).
By Ferran Sanz, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona
Information & Communication Committee (ICC)
The Editorial Board of the newsletter MedChemWatch had a meeting in Barcelona to discuss further improvements of the newsletter and a reorganisation of the Web-page. For next year the newsletter will be published in four issues (March, June, September, December) and also include selected book reports. With respect to the Web-page, the menus will be rearranged in order to achieve a better presentation of the main activities of EFMC. This also will include the presentation of the abstract books of EFMC sponsored events. Furthermore, as already decided by the Council, we will start to implement a job-portal. In a first implementation phase, this service will be offered to our corporate members. Later on it will also be possible that individuals upload their CV and key data. Last but not least we installed a tracking system which allows a thorough analysis of the traffic related to our web-page. This revealed that we have already around 200 page views per day
By Gerhard F. Ecker, University of Vienna
