The theme for this year’s World Health Day is Together for Health, Stand with Science, highlighting how scientific collaboration can protect health. IHI and IMI projects have collaboration at their core – bringing diverse groups of researchers from various sectors together for bold transformations in health.
“This World Health Day, let’s celebrate the power of scientific collaboration,” says Maria Pilar Aguar Fernandez, the director of the People Directorate of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation.
“Horizon Europe is the most open and one of the largest research and innovation programmes globally. Through public-private partnerships like IHI, our aim is to bring together a diverse range of expertise to accelerate innovation, advance health research, and deliver meaningful impact for patients across Europe and beyond.”
Collaboration is in our DNA
“Collaboration is in our DNA,” says Niklas Blomberg, IHI’s executive director. “And that gives us strength to take on large-scale challenges that affect Europe’s entire healthcare ecosystem, problems that are either too hard or too high risk for any single organisation to tackle alone. Our projects bring together industry, academia, hospitals, patient organisations, philanthropists, regulators and many more healthcare stakeholders to generate bold and powerful collaborations that can transform health.”
Every single IHI and IMI project is a public-private collaboration, drawing the best minds from both the public and the private side of health research to tackle common challenges for the benefit of patients. The approaches favoured might differ, but fresh perspectives can be gained from working together and the collaborative partnerships open up possibilities that were not considered before. This can lead to breakthroughs and new innovations.
“Academia and industry often tackle the same questions from different angles, but both perspectives are essential for real-world impact,” says Ariane Bollack, an early-stage researcher who started her career in an IMI project.
Bollack’s PhD was carried out within the IMI AMYPAD project, and learning about research from both the public and private perspective helped her to transition to a career with GE Healthcare while retaining an honorary research position at University College London. Her experience of both worlds has enabled her to keep a foot in both camps and combine applied research at GE Healthcare with more exploratory projects from the academic side.
Collaboration across sectors to deliver long-term benefits
While the Innovative Medicines Initiative, IHI’s predecessor, focused mainly on health innovations in the pharmaceutical sector, IHI embraces innovation across the medtech, imaging, medical devices, biotechnology and vaccine development sectors as well as pharmaceuticals. This broadens the scope of IHI projects and breaks down silos, enabling projects to achieve breakthroughs that would otherwise be impossible.
“IHI is a globally critical platform for public-private collaboration in biotechnology,” says Claire Skentelbery, director-general of EuropaBio and member of IHI’s governing board, where she represents the biotechnology industry.
“Through collaboration across biotech companies of all sizes, together with public partners, a foundation for delivery of long term patient benefits and a robust European health system is created,” she says.
Collaboration as a catalyst for lasting health impact
The research breakthroughs achieved by IHI and IMI project results are more readily transformed into real-world impact thanks to the presence of partners like the health industry, regulators, and patients.
“IMI and IHI prove the transformative power of shared purpose. When scientists, clinicians, industry, and society join forces, possibilities expand, and innovation accelerates,” says Anna Chioti, chair of IHI’s Science and Innovation Panel and head of the Division of Pharmacy and Medicines (DPM) within the Directorate of Health and Ministry of Health in Luxembourg.
“Such partnerships turn collective ambition into real advances for patients, showing that collaboration isn’t just a method, it's the catalyst that can transform ideas into lasting health impact.”
One example of an IHI project addressing a pressing health need for lasting impact through the collaborative public-private research partnership is VIROMARKERS. The project is developing biomarkers that would revolutionise the care of people living with HIV and hepatitis D, as well as stem cell transplant patients at risk of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection or reactivation. The biomarkers will help to predict which patients will respond best to various treatments for HIV and hepatitis D, as well as tracking the risk of disease rebound in HIV patients.
“By connecting science, clinical expertise and industry, VIROMARKERS highlights the value of teamwork. Our partnership amplifies the power of collaboration to fuel discoveries of viral biomarkers for HIV, Hepatitis and transplanted patients, to improve patient health and join the global fight against viral infections,” says Francesca Incardona, CEO of the EUResist Network, a non-profit partnership devoted to understanding and fighting the resistance to anti-HIV drugs, and project coordinator of VIROMARKERS.
Collaboration results in greater scientific impact
Time and again, IHI and IMI’s publication record demonstrates that conducting collaborative science pays off in terms of scientific impact. In 2025, international IMI papers with authors from different countries scored a field-normalised citation impact of 2.47, compared to 1.58 for single-country publications. IMI cross-sector research scored a field-normalised impact of 2.37 compared to 1.71 in single sector. And cross-institution research delivered 2.47 compared to 1.58 for single-institution research.
Engaging with people with lived experience from the outset
When it comes to health research, the collaborative nature of IHI and IMI projects enable partners to consider health challenges from different angles and explore avenues that they wouldn’t have necessarily examined before.
People with lived experience of diseases and illnesses are essential collaborators during the research process, and IHI and IMI projects benefit from their unique perspectives at all stages of research. Ken Tait has contributed to two IMI projects in that capacity, namely HypoResolve which researched the hypoglycaemic events experienced by type 1 diabetics and Trials@Home which investigated how clinical trials could be conducted from participants’ homes.
“Being a person with lived experience who has been involved with research teams I have found that we are being listened to and contribute meaningful information from a different perspective in the co-design of the project,” he says.
Thinking outside the traditional box
For philanthropic organisations like the Children’s Tumor Foundation, IHI and IMI projects provide a platform to push the current boundaries in health research and explore cutting-edge possibilities that could be game-changers for people with lived experiences of diseases and their families.
“The tragedy of rare diseases in 2026 is not a lack of science, but a lack of visionaries, focused on turning discovery into treatments,” says Annette Bakker, CEO of the Children’s Tumor Foundation, which is an associated partner in the IMI EU-PEARL project.
“Molecules that could help patients exist, waiting for creative minds who dare to challenge the traditional ways of doing things. The Children's Tumor Foundation has a system, built in partnership with IHI, ready to deliver these therapies to those who need them. World Health Day is not about hashtags and social media posts! It is an invitation to action for all the visionaries in pharma, investment, philanthropy, and funders to join us to dare to think outside the traditional box.”