22nd Edition – March 2013

IMI Stakeholder Forum 2013 - Nobel Prize winner confirmed as speaker

Nobel Laureate and leading immunologist Rolf Zinkernagel of the University of Zurich in Switzerland will be the closing keynote speaker at IMI’s Stakeholder Forum which will be held in Brussels, Belgium on Monday 13 May 2013. Professor Zinkernagel was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996, along with Peter C. Doherty of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in the US, for ‘discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune defence’.

The morning of the Stakeholder Forum will be dedicated to brain research, and the opening address will be delivered by neurologist Richard Frackowiak of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. In addition to experts from IMI’s neurology projects, other confirmed speakers include Françoise Grosstête MEP and Robert-Jan Smits, Director General of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation.
Registration for the event will open shortly.
 

Flu vaccines subject of new indicative IMI Call topic

‘Correlates of protection for influenza vaccines’ is the title of a new indicative topic under consideration for inclusion in a future IMI Call for proposals. The topic refers to the need to develop better tests to determine the actual levels of protection offered by flu vaccines to different groups (e.g. the elderly, children, adults, etc.). Other topics already under consideration for future Calls are:

• Development of drug-drug combinations
• Leveraging emerging technology for pharmacovigilance
• Developing an aetiology-based taxonomy for human diseases: respiratory disease with a focus on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

Outlines of some of these topics are already available on the Future Topics page of the IMI website. More information on all planned topics will be made available as soon as possible.

All information regarding future IMI Calls for proposals is indicative and subject to change. Final information about IMI’s future Calls will be communicated after approval by the IMI Governing Board.

Lively discussions at joint IMI – C-Path event

Over 120 people took part in the recent event on ‘Collaborating for cures - leveraging global public-private partnerships (PPPs) to accelerate biopharmaceuticals development’, which was organised jointly by IMI and the Critical Path Institute (C-Path). Many more followed the event online.

The event was the scene of lively discussions on issues such as intellectual property, the involvement of patients in research, and how to measure the success of a PPP. The afternoon featured case studies of IMI and C-Path projects on Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis. The presentations are already online on the event web page, and a report on the event will be released in the near future. Meanwhile, people who want to watch the debates can catch up by watching the webcast (NB registration is required).
 

IMI’s personalised medicine projects in the spotlight in Dublin

Around 70 people attended the IMI workshop Applying open innovation to bring personalised medicine to new disease areas in Dublin, Ireland on 20 March. The event featured presentations demonstrating how IMI projects are working on personalised medicines development in diverse disease areas, most notably severe asthma (U-BIOPRED), rheumatoid arthritis (BT-Cure, and type 2 diabetes (DIRECT). The IMI workshop set the stage for a wider conference, organised by the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM), on the current barriers to the wider use of personalised medicines and how they can be dismantled. A report on personalised medicine, including a section on IMI, will be published in the near future.

Thomson Reuters report highlights impact of IMI projects

A new report prepared by Thomson Reuters for IMI sheds new light on the quality of research taking place in IMI projects. The report, based on an analysis of IMI research associated with projects launched under IMI’s first three Calls for proposals, uses citations as an index of research quality and co-authorship as an index of collaboration. The report reveals that IMI projects have produced 320 publications so far and that figure is rising fast. Furthermore, the report notes that IMI project research is ‘well-regarded’ – the citation impact of IMI research is well above both world and European averages, and over a tenth of papers from IMI projects are ‘highly cited’ (i.e. when ranked by the number of times they are cited in other papers, they fall in the top 10% of papers in their journal category and year of publication).

The collaborative nature of IMI projects is also made clear in the report, which shows that two-fifths of all publications by IMI researchers are cross-sector (e.g. academic institutions working with biotech companies). In addition, around a quarter of all publications were cross-project. Thomson Reuters is continually analysing the output of IMI’s projects, and the next report will be published in the autumn.

UK Chief Medical Officer points to IMI in major antibiotic resistance report

IMI hit the headlines earlier in March when it was cited in a major report on antimicrobial resistance published by the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies. Launching the report, Professor Davies stated that antibiotic resistance poses a ‘catastrophic threat’, and underlined the urgent need for new antibiotics, among other things, to tackle the problem. Here, she pointed to IMI as an example of how the pharmaceutical industry can be incentivised to work on antibiotic development. As a result, IMI was mentioned in articles in the Guardian, BBC, and Euractiv, among others.

European Journal of Immunology puts IMI projects in the spotlight

A new article in the European Journal of Immunology sets out how IMI is helping to advance immunology research with projects on topics such as rheumatoid arthritis, severe asthma, vaccine safety, and biopharmaceuticals. The article was written by IMI Executive Director Michel Goldman and Scientific Officers Maria Teresa De Magistris and Angela Wittelsberger. ‘By fostering collaboration between large pharmaceutical industries, academic teams, and biotechnology companies, IMI is supporting translational immunology and innovative approaches for the treatment of immune-based disorders and the development of safe and efficient vaccines,’ they write. ‘It is our hope that the community of European immunologists will provide major contributions to the new ecosystem that is needed to reach the ultimate objective of IMI, namely to align the interests of industry and society for the benefit of patients.’