IMI has over 20 projects in this area accounting for around 10 % of IMI’s budget. Most focus on Alzheimer’s disease, the most prevalent cause of dementia, but we also have projects on other dementia causing conditions such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. The projects cover the whole spectrum of medical research and drug development, and patients play an active role in many projects, bringing their knowledge and experience of their disease to the table. Given the complexity of the brain and nervous system, it is unsurprising that many of our projects are unravelling the role of specific genes and proteins in disease. Other projects are exploring ways of identifying people at greatest risk of developing dementia and on how to improve diagnosis, management and development of novel treatments. We also have projects applying a ‘big data’ approach to progress in the area.

This event was part of  a series of  live sessions that IMI is organising on IMI Impacts, where key actors explored the key challenges in their respective fields and demonstrate how IMI contributed. During these sessions, we also shared patients’ testimonies, as they are the ultimate beneficiaries of IMI’s funded research.

Furthermore, we engaged IMI stakeholders in a broader discussion on IMI’s impact. With this initiative, we demonstrated the successful IMI model of radical collaboration.