Hi-tech health gets €2bn boost

The European Commission and EU industry will next Tuesday (15 May) launch a €2 billion scheme to speed up the development of new medicines and healthcare technologies.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) was chosen by the Commission in 2005 as one of six joint technology initiatives in areas thought to offer the best chances for EU research breakthroughs.

"Health is a tremendously important area for the EU and is highly competitive worldwide," said an official from the Commission’s research department, "but there are tremendous costs involved in developing new and innovative products for the market."

He added: "Sharing risks and data at an early stage can really improve the situation."

The IMI will pull together groups of industry experts, academics, healthcare professionals and patients, to help turn research findings into marketable therapies. The initiative will look for ways to identify the most promising pre-clinical projects at an early stage, saving money on projects likely to fail final safety or efficacy trials.

It will be managed by the Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries Association (EFPIA), which are each expected to pledge €1bn to the initiative in 2008-13.

Only public sector participants and small- and medium-sized enterprises will be eligible for a share of the money, with large companies still expected to pay for their own research efforts.

Karen Strandgaard of EFPIA said that the industry group had committed itself to promoting a wide range of research priorities under the IMI: "We will be looking in particular at five disease areas: brain disease, cancers, metabolic diseases like diabetes, infectious diseases and inflammatory conditions like arthritis and asthma.

"The EU has a role to play improving the scientific groundwork for innovative medicines in all these sectors."

But the IMI will only be a first step towards getting healthcare innovations on the market, warned Strandgaard. Even if the new initiative finds ways of speeding up the development of therapies, according to EFPIA new drugs are still likely to struggle with unfavourable EU market conditions.

"We’ll have to take things one step at a time," said Strandgaard. "Let’s just see if we can get more drugs out there through this initiative first."

The IMI regulation will be published on the same day as a proposal for a joint technology initiative to develop ‘embedded computing systems’ - a miniature computer designed to carry out a few specific tasks.

Four joint technology initiatives on nanoelectronics, fuel cells, aeronautics and environment monitoring technologies are due before the end of 2008.

The European Commission and EU industry will next Tuesday (15 May) launch a €2 billion scheme to speed up the development of new medicines and healthcare technologies.