This episode of the Insider podcast was called Partnerships in the Age of Strategic Autonomy. It was hosted by Riccardo Miguéis from Brussels INESC Hub and it explored what sets IHI apart from other public-private partnerships as well as how public-private partnerships like IHI can deliver strategic outcomes for Europe. You can listen to the full podcast here.
Strength lies in community
The community that has formed around IHI projects is crucial for success.
Niklas spoke about how the public-private nature of IHI projects brings a wide range of stakeholders and their diverse viewpoints around the same table.
“It’s about bringing together health companies, civil society organisations – this is where European partnerships have an edge,” said Niklas.
And it's not just industry and academic partners involved. For instance, philanthropic and patient organisations play an important role by bringing their deep expertise in a specific area and their long-term vision for the future of treating a disease.
“Philanthropic organisations have an idea of the drivers, the landscape and an idea of where they would want to take the field long-term, how do you really transform and create added value. That’s an incredibly important partner,” said Niklas.
Capabilities, not cash
IHI is not a cash-only partnership – the industry partners contribute valuable expertise, equipment, data and other resources that can help propel research forwards and enable research projects to explore avenues that would otherwise be closed to academics.
“It enables us to do research differently but also to do different research,” said Niklas.
It also focuses industry resources on large-scale health problems that will ultimately benefit patients. One example where IHI and IMI are making a difference is in mental health.
“Mental health is a big and growing problem. We launched a call recently to look at a lot of different conditions and try to understand the underlying mechanisms of mental health diseases. The idea is to see if there are robust biological markers for the diseases to come up with new avenues for treating mental health disorders. That’s a complicated biological problem, it’s a very difficult project and it’s a good example of what we do well in these European PPPs,” said Niklas.
Health research driven by policy goals
“The PPP is an effective way of turning long-term policy objectives into concrete actions,” Niklas said, speaking about how the topics that are covered in IHI calls address policy goals laid out by the European Commission.
The policies that IHI and IMI projects are contributing to include the Strategy for Life Sciences, the European Biotech Act, EU Mission on Cancer, Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, the AI Act, the regulation on the European Health Data Space, the Critical Medicines Act, the Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe, and much more. Making the European health industry competitive is also a vital objective of the public-private partnership.
“There needs to be a line of sight between our projects and the public priorities,” said Niklas.
IHI employs a diverse approach to reach those policy objectives. For some calls, IHI is prescriptive about what needs to be done and how, whereas for other calls IHI takes an applicant-driven approach, outlining the broad goals but asking applicants to propose their own unique roadmap on how to get there.
Value for industry partners
Niklas highlighted the need to ensure that our projects are attractive to industry – because the opportunity cost of taking part in an IHI project is not negligible, and there must be a benefit to the industry partners.
"Every partner coming into this partnership has an individual business case, they are looking to add value to their operations," explained Niklas. "On the private side, you have to make the project interesting enough so that companies put the money into our projects instead of licensing a product or putting it into internal R&D."
One clear added value of a public-private partnership is the ability to pool capabilities across organisations to address issues that affect everyone.
"We can work on problems that are either too hard or too high risk for any single organisation to work on alone," said Niklas.
For instance, in the upcoming European pharmaceutical legislation, there is a provision for regulatory sandboxes. These are flexible spaces where innovators and regulators can collaborate and explore the best way to regulate a new technology so that end users are protected, while innovations are not held back by barriers that could be found in the existing regulatory framework. A recently launched project, BRIDGE, is now investigating how regulatory sandboxes for health could function. The project will bring many stakeholders together to envision what an effective regulatory sandbox might look like, and will then launch a pilot.
"We’ve managed to create a framework where different companies are quite comfortable to work together on important problems in a non-competitive space," said Niklas.
Benefits for academics and young researchers
Niklas spoke about how concerns about whether taking part in the PPP would limit the number of peer-reviewed papers published have been completely quashed thanks to the strong bibliometric performance of the programme.
"If you can’t publish good papers from the projects we are running, young academics will be limited in their career. It’s important that we support the development of the young academic community. What’s the point of running an academic-industry collaboration if the best academics are turning away because it limits careers," he said.