IHI’s third year has been a busy one! We welcomed our new Executive Director, Niklas Blomberg, and celebrated the launch of the 200th project since the Innovative Medicines Initiative started.
Eleven brand-new IHI projects kicked off this year, and we launched three calls searching for innovative solutions to:
- treat chronic diseases,
- develop guidance on how to use real-world data and real-world evidence,
- improve clinical management of heart disease, optimise hospital workflows,
- clinically validate biomarkers,
- reduce mortality from cardiovascular disease,
- develop new endpoints for osteoarthritis,
- model new regulatory sandbox mechanisms and how to deploy them,
- and use digital health technologies to develop patient-centred endpoints.
We hope that the projects that are funded under these calls will deliver solutions that can help to address these challenges and propel health research forward – we look forward to seeing the progress that will be made!
Continuing to deliver results
Our Innovative Medicines Initiative projects are continuing to deliver groundbreaking results that shape the healthcare sector. In April, a treatment for severe infections and hospital-associated pneumonias caused by multi-drug resistant bacteria that was supported by IMI project COMBACTE-CARE received marketing authorisation from the European Commission. The result clearly demonstrates how large public-private partnerships can make a big difference in challenging fields.
Several IMI project results are being integrated into clinical trials – for instance, a new clinical trial testing the best administration route for an experimental arthritis treatment is using outcome measures established by the RT Cure project to evaluate its performance, while the Children’s Tumor Foundation and the Global Coalition for Adaptive Research are using EU-PEARL’s platform trial model to conduct a clinical trial for patients with neurofibromatosis-1 and schwannomatosis.
IMI projects are also influencing the rules regarding the tests that drug manufacturers have to run – the VAC2VAC project provided vital evidence showing that non-animal tests can reliably detect certain contaminants in medicines administered by injection. The project’s work helped to convince the European Pharmacopoeia Commission (EPC) to eliminate the rabbit pyrogen test from its monographs, and from 1 July 2025 the test will no longer be required.
Looking towards the future
Looking towards the future, our first applicant-driven call is set to be launched early next year. The goal is to find innovative, bottom-up ideas that address our strategic objectives – you can find more information about call 9 here.
To help potential applicants build strong consortia, we organised a brokerage event in November with 386 attendees onsite and more than 60 people presenting their ideas for potential projects. We also livestreamed the event and posted the recording online – you can check it out here.
In 2025, we’ll also be launching call 10 – with topics on digital labelling, the European Digital Health Space, and PFAS exposure, emissions and end-of-life management. You can read our draft topic texts here.
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