IMI aims €130m at medical research's unanswered questions

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is taking aim at some of drug development’s unanswered questions with its latest round of funding.

The European public-private partnership has a €130m fund for proposals on topics such as Alzheimer’s disease, big data, vaccines, autoimmune disease and the blood-brain barrier.

“As these new call topics show, there are still many challenges and unanswered questions in medical research and drug development,” said Pierre Meulien, executive director for IMI.

Proposals are also being sought on running more reliable clinical trials for primary Sjorgren’s Syndrome (pSS), getting drugs across the blood-brain barrier and delivering a European screening centre.

“I am optimistic that by bringing together the best people from the public and private sectors, the IMI will help to make progress in these important areas and contribute to accelerating medicines development,” added Meulien.

The IMI brings together the European Union - whose Horizon 2020 programme will supply half of the fund - and the European pharmaceutical industry in the form of  EFPIA companies and associated partners.

The proposal also aims to take on a plan to further develop some of its earlier projects, which have either finished or are coming to an end.

The IMI said in a statement: “A number of these have generated significant results that would benefit from some support to facilitate their transition to long term sustainability and availability to the scientific community.”

Such work includes the IMI education and training programmes EMTRAIN and PharmaTrain, RAPP-ID - its infectious disease diagnostic programme -, side-effects medicine reporting project WEB-RADR and its GetReal project - which provides real world drug data into drug development.

The deadline for the submission of proposals for the latest round of IMI funding is 24 October.