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Innovative Medicines Initiative

Europe’s largest public-private initiative aiming to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for patients.

9 May 2019

A finger touches braille on a box of tablets.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is Europe’s largest public-private initiative between the EU and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), aiming to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for patients. IMI supports collaborative European research projects to support pharmaceutical innovation in Europe.

The second IMI programme (IMI2) will deliver tools, methods and prevention and treatment options (directly or indirectly) that will progress the vision of personalised medicine and prevention. It is not purely focused on the development of new medicines, but on solutions that provide a holistic, personalised healthcare package. The Strategic Research Agenda for IMI 2 is set to achieve the vision of delivering ‘the right prevention and treatment to the right patient at the right time’ for priority diseases.

Calls for proposals

IMI2 call 17

IMI launched call 17 on 22 January 2019, with the following topics:

Optimising future obesity treatment
Open access chemogenomics library and chemical probes for the druggable genome
Intelligent prediction and identification of environmental risks posed by human medicinal products.

More information on the topics is available on the IMI call page.

If you were unable to attend the call 17 webinars held between 23 and 31 January 2019, you can watch a recording and download the presentations on the IMI website.

If you are submitting a proposal on the call 17 topics, please register your organisation on the UK government's RI Portal concerning the underwriting of EU funds in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

The deadline for stage 1 calls has passed. The deadline for stage 2 calls is 7 November 2019.

IMI2 calls 15 and 16

IMI2 has published details of the topics for its calls 15 and 16. The deadline for stage 1 calls has passed. The deadline for stage 2 calls is 15 May 2019.

For stage 2 calls, topics include:

Strategic Research Agenda

The Strategic Research Agenda highlights priorities for the €20bn programme. IMI2 will endeavour to address major bottlenecks from discovery to delivery.

Target identification and biomarker research (efficacy and safety)

IMI2 will focus on gaining better understanding of disease mechanisms to facilitate target identification and use this knowledge for the identification of biomarkers predictive of efficacy, as well as biomarkers that may serve as surrogate markers in clinical trials.

Driving the adoption of innovative clinical trial design

IMI2 will drive towards innovative concepts to be used in clinical trials, such as precision medicine. It will assist in developing new patient focused outcome measures; new trial paradigms to support the evaluation of benefit/risk in small numbers of patient populations and the development of infrastructures for the collection and sharing of trial data, together with methods for meta-analysis of trial data to investigate outcomes across multiple trials in different locations.