IMI News
- IMI Stakeholder Forum 2014 – save the date!
- Meet IMI in Vienna at the DIA EuroMeeting
- IMI 11th Call – deadline approaching
- Article highlights IMI’s flexible approach to intellectual property rights
- GETREAL project to incorporate real life data into drug development
News from our projects
IMI Stakeholder Forum 2014 – save the date!
The IMI Stakeholder Forum 2014 will take place on Wednesday 21 May in Brussels, Belgium.
The event is a unique opportunity to learn about and discuss IMI’s latest results, activities and plans.
This year’s IMI Stakeholder Forum will feature two sessions. The morning will start with a scientific focus on breakthroughs in stem cell research. The event will kick off with a keynote speech by Ole Isacson, Professor at Harvard Medical School. This will be followed by presentations by IMI projects working in this exciting area. The afternoon will focus on the next phase of IMI. Taking stock of the results achieved to date, this session aims to open up a debate with all IMI’s stakeholders on how to drive health innovation under Horizon 2020.
IMI warmly encourages policy-makers, small and medium-sized enterprises, patient organisations, regulatory authorities, academic teams, industry, hospitals and other organisations with an interest in IMI projects to take part in the Stakeholder Forum.
Registration for the IMI Stakeholder Forum will open soon via the IMI website. Participation in this event is free of charge.
- For more information and to download the draft agenda, visit the event page on the IMI website.
Meet IMI in Vienna at the DIA EuroMeeting
IMI will have a stand at the exhibition of the DIA EuroMeeting 2014 that will take place in Vienna, Austria, from 25 to 27 March. This yearly event is organised by the Drug Information Association (DIA).
IMI and its projects also feature in a number of the conference sessions, and the Education and Training projects will have their own stand at the exhibition.
- IMI stand: X.520
- IMI Education & Training projects’ stand: S.8
- For an overview of IMI’s involvement in the programme, visit the IMI at DIA webpage
- Download the full conference programme
IMI 11th Call – deadline approaching
The deadline for submitting Expressions of Interest for IMI’s 11th Call for proposals is approaching fast. All submissions must be made via the online submissions tool SOFIA by 17:00 Brussels time (CEST) on 8 April 2014. For the full Call text and details of how to apply, see the Call Overview tool or visit the 11th Call – Stage 1 web page.
- Check out the presentations from the 11th Call webinars covering the Call topics and IMI’s rules and procedures.
- Questions? Contact the IMI scientific officer responsible for the topic you are interested in.
Article highlights IMI’s flexible approach to intellectual property rights
IMI Legal Manager Magali Poinot teamed up with Senior Scientific Project Manager Hugh Laverty in a recent article that highlights the need for an innovative approach to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The paper is published in the US-based Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, a student-edited journal dedicated to encouraging critical, reflective thinking by scholars and practitioners regarding important cutting-edge issues in intellectual property law.
The article concludes that the success of IMI’s flexible IPR model lies in its aim ‘to promote and reward knowledge creation, innovation, disclosure, and exploitation, through fair rewards and allocation of Rights’, in a way which recognises the specific needs of each consortium. This is particularly relevant to public-private partnerships like IMI, ‘given the diversity of projects supported by IMI and the complexities associated to IP management’.
- Read the article
- Find out more about the IMI’s IPR policy
GETREAL project to incorporate real life data into drug development
IMI has launched a new project called GETREAL that will investigate new ways of integrating data from real life settings, such as clinics, into drug development. This will assist healthcare decision makers when deciding how best to grant patients access to a new treatment and help pharmaceutical companies to take better decisions during drug development. Once a new drug has been developed health technology assessment (HTA) bodies must assess the drug’s ‘relative effectiveness’, which is the extent to which a treatment does more good than harm when compared to one or more alternative treatments when provided under normal healthcare circumstances. Ideally, HTA organisations need data from real life settings, yet there is little guidance on how to generate real world data and integrate this into drug development before launch.
GETREAL brings together for the first time all key stakeholders (industry, academia, regulatory agencies, health technology assessment bodies, healthcare budget holders, and patient groups) to share their perspectives and insights on how effectiveness/relative effectiveness can best be assessed in HTA decision-making processes, and so will pave the way for advancing the development of new approaches for incorporating real life data into drug development.
- Read IMI’s press release on the project launch.
- Read the project factsheet
- Visit the project website
Physical activity in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) causes severe breathing difficulties and is one of the most common lung diseases. Research has shown that patients who suffer from lung diseases reduce their physical activity levels; this has an impact on their participation in social life. So far the interaction between physical activity and COPD related factors as well as the consequences of physical inactivity for patients with COPD had never been systematically reviewed.
This is why the IMI PROactive project conducted a review to identify and summarise existing studies. The studies taken into consideration focus on associations between physical activity, its determining factors, and its impact on patients with COPD. This review was recently published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ)’s Thorax, a leading international peer-reviewed journal for health professionals in respiratory medicine (IF 8.3).
The outcome of this systematic review will help clinicians to interpret previous research on the topic, and to identify research priorities. Its main findings are that many studies focus on clinical, functional, socio-demographic and lifestyle factors as the ones determining physical activity levels in patients with COPD. Few studies have taken an integrated approach and, unfortunately, the quality of evidence in these studies remains very low rendering results inconsistent.
This review’s key conclusion is that physical activity should be included in planned cohort studies and randomised trials to provide a stronger evidence base for determinants and outcomes of physical activity and for developing recommendations for or against treatments in clinical guidelines.
- Read the review published by PROactive in Thorax (open access).
- Follow PROactive on Twitter @PROactiveCOPD.
EUPATI training course – applications open
IMI’s education and training project EUPATI is launching an expert-level course in medicines research and development specifically tailored for patients and patient representatives. The certificate course will begin in September 2014 and will be a mixture of online and face-to-face education modules over a 13-month period. Details of the subjects covered, the methodology, and the timelines can be found in the Guide for Applicants
- Deadline for applications: 20 April 2014.
- Apply for the course online
- For more information, check out the FAQ
ENABLE launches Call for Gram-negative programmes
IMI’s new antimicrobial resistance project ENABLE has launched its first open call for promising Gram-negative programmes.
If you have an interesting Gram-negative programme that targets Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and/or Acinetobacter baumannii and that meets the minimum activity thresholds specified within the call text, this is an opportunity to join the ENABLE project. Selected programmes will gain access to the ENABLE discovery pipeline, which can develop a programme through to phase I clinical trials and significantly accelerate your work.
The first deadline is 31 March 2014, and regular six-month deadlines will be scheduled following this, with the next deadline planned for mid-September.
If you are interested in applying, please visit the open calls page of the project website for full details and a template for completing the three-page expression of interest.
- Questions? Contact opencall[AT]nd4bb-enable.eu.