- Big data, drug safety assessment, and pain among proposed Call topics
- Coming soon: a new Call on Ebola
- Sign up for the Call webinars in January
- IMI in the spotlight in the European Parliament
- IMI antimicrobial resistance projects making progress
Big data, drug safety assessment, and pain among proposed Call topics
The following indicative topics are under consideration for inclusion in future IMI Calls for proposals:
- Validation of translational imaging methods in drug safety assessment (TRISTAN)
- Identification of drugable targets modulating misfolded proteins in major neurodegenerative diseases
- Pathological neuron-glia interactions in neuropathic pain
- Dry age-related macular degeneration: development of novel clinical endpoints for clinical trials with a regulatory and patient access intention
- A comprehensive ‘paediatric preclinical POC platform’ to enable clinical molecule development for children with cancer
Topics under the Big Data for Better Outcomes programme:
- Coordination and support action (CSA) for the Big Data for Better Outcomes programme
- Increase access and use of high quality data to improve clinical outcomes in heart failure (HF), atrial fibrillation (AF), and acute coronary syndrome (ACS) patients
Drafts of the topic texts can be found on the Future Topics page of the IMI website. All information regarding future IMI Call topics is indicative and subject to change. Final information about future IMI Calls will be communicated after approval by the IMI Governing Board.
Coming soon: a new Call on Ebola
Also scheduled for launch in the coming weeks is a new Call that will build on IMI’s ‘Ebola and other filoviral haemorrhagic fevers’ (Ebola+) programme'. This open Call for proposals is designed to ensure the world is better prepared if and when a future outbreak of Ebola or a related disease occurs. The Call has a broad scope; the goal is to capture emerging scientific advances and to progress those rapidly into health care interventions. Ultimately, projects funded under this Call should ensure fast development, uptake and/or wide deployment of sustainable innovative solutions that will result in an increased readiness to respond to future outbreaks.
- Download the indicative Call text at the Future Topics page
Sign up for the Call webinars in January
In January 2016, IMI will hold webinars on each topic of the upcoming IMI2 7th and 8th Calls for proposals, as well as one webinar on IMI2 rules and procedures.
All webinars on the Call topics will feature a presentation by the EFPIA topic coordinator and time for questions and answers. The webinar on IMI’s new rules and procedures will also include presentations of IMI's intellectual property policy and tips on the preparation of proposal submissions.
The webinars represent an excellent opportunity to learn more about the Call topics, interact directly with the topic coordinators, and get in touch with potential project partners to form a Consortium. Webinar participants can benefit additionally if they submit the questions and comments in advance, which moderators can answer during the webinar.
The webinars schedule and registration link will soon be available via the Events page.
IMI in the spotlight in the European Parliament
IMI will present the state of play and its results to date during a series of events in the European Parliament and Committee of the Regions in Brussels, Belgium in early December. The events take place in the framework of the 7th European Innovation Summit from 8–10 December 2015 and in the presence of policy makers, industries, SMEs, and academic and research organisations. For this event, IMI is working closely with its fellow joint undertakings – BBI (bio-based industries), Clean Sky (aeronautics), ECSEL, (electronic components), FCH (fuel cells and hydrogen), and SESAR (aviation).
During a joint session ‘Socio-economic impact of the Joint Undertakings’ on Tuesday 8 December from 17:00 to 19:00 (PHS 5B001), IMI will look beyond the current achievements and investigate the broader socio-economic impacts of the public-private partnership model that is delivering results which improve the drug development process, making it faster and more efficient.
IMI will also participate in the session ‘Innovation Ecosystems Part II: Working across sectors’ on Wednesday 9 December, 11:00-13:00 (CoR, room VM3).
Finally, all JUs will have stands at the exhibition area in the European Parliament.
IMI antimicrobial resistance projects making progress
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill 25 000 people in the EU every year, and cost the economy €1.5 billion. IMI’s programme New Drugs 4 Bad Bugs (ND4BB) represents an unprecedented partnership between industry, academia and biotech organisations to combat antibiotic resistance by tackling the scientific, regulatory, and business challenges that are hampering the development of new antibiotics. On European Antibiotic Awareness Day (18 November), IMI released a factsheet highlighting the latest outputs of its ND4BB projects. These include:
- TRANSLOCATION has worked out the structure of proteins that play a role in allowing substances (like antibiotics) into and out of bacterial cells.
- ENABLE has 5 antibiotic development programmes ongoing and more in the pipeline.
- COMBACTE is creating a vast, pan-European network of over 500 hospitals spanning 344 cities in 38 countries. The project is now ensuring they are all qualified to run high quality clinical studie.
- DRIVE-AB scientists discovered that a 30% drop in the efficacy of antibiotics could result in 120 000 additional infections and 6 300 deaths per year in the US alone among people who undergo common surgeries and chemotherapy treatments.
IMI’s ND4BB programme now comprises 7 projects with a total budget of close on €700 million.
eTRIKS provides practical advice on data standards
IMI’s knowledge management project eTRIKS has created a ‘standards starter pack’ to raise awareness of, and provide guidance on, data standards in clinical, genomic and translational data management. Data standards are vital tools in data management, as they make it easier to load data into knowledge management platforms and compare it to other datasets that have applied the same standards. Until now, information on standardisation was fragmented; the new starter pack provides a comprehensive, easy to navigate map of standardisation efforts. As such, it is designed primarily for data managers, data curators and scientists concerned with the long term impact and visibility, reproducibility, reuseability of their work.
The landscape of data standardisation is constantly evolving, as new techniques are developed and new therapeutic areas covered. For this reason, eTRIKS aims to release twice-yearly updates of its starter pack. Furthermore, the team is working on companion documents as well as curation support tools to facilitate implementation of the recommended standards.
Meanwhile, eTRIKS is keen to receive feedback on the current version of the standards starter pack.
Drug delivery project ORBITO wins prizes at major conference
Scientists from IMI project OrBiTo hit the prize jackpot at the annual meeting of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) in Florida recently. The AAPS meeting is the world’s largest pharmaceutics conference. ORBITO’s prize winners:
- Andrés Olivares-Morales of the University of Manchester, UK scooped an AAPS Graduate Student Research Achievement Award in Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics and Drug Metabolism and Clinical Pharmacology and Translational Research.
- Philip Jonas Sassene of the University of Copenhagen won an AAPS Lipid-Based Drug Delivery Graduate Student Award.
- Bart Hens of the University of Leuven won second prize in the AAPS Oral Absorption Focus Group Graduate Student Poster Award.
OrBiTo was highly visible at the conference; the project had a total of seven posters on display, and a symposium featuring speakers from the project was live-streamed via the internet. The goal of OrBiTo is to enhance our understanding of how orally-administered drugs are taken up from the gastrointestinal tract into the body, and apply this knowledge to create new laboratory tests and computer models that will better predict the performance of these drugs in patients.
Open PHACTS to hold workshop on linking life science data
IMI knowledge management project Open PHACTS will hold a workshop entitled ‘Linking Life Science Data: Design to Implementation, and Beyond’ in Vienna, Austria, on 18-19 February 2016. The conference will include a variety of expert speakers and open discussions on linking data in the life sciences domain. The agenda includes:
- an overview of what has been achieved so far in this domain, by the Open PHACTS project and by others;
- demonstrations of what can be done with existing linked data;
- how different sectors are moving towards linking more data;
- what concrete steps can be taken to address the challenges still to be met.
Places are limited – register your interest now.
The conference will also include a poster competition for early career researchers. The deadline for poster submissions is 11 January 2016. All successful applicants will be eligible for up to €400 of travel assistance, and the best poster will receive an award of €300.
Save the date! Health data event on 10 March 2016
The inaugural conference of the European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (i~HD) will be held in Paris, France on 10 March 2016. i~HD is a non-profit institute that was born out of the IMI electronic health records project EHR4CR and other related projects. Its mission is to guide and catalyse the quality, interoperability and trustworthy uses of health data, for optimising health and knowledge discovery.
This inaugural conference will mark the launch of a novel European platform to support multi-centre clinical research. This operational platform, the result of EHR4CR, can connect securely to the data within multiple hospital electronic health record (HER) systems and clinical data warehouses across Europe, to enable a trial sponsor to predict the number of eligible patients for a candidate clinical trial protocol, to assess its feasibility and to locate the most relevant hospital sites. Also on the agenda is IMI’s EMIF, Europe’s largest ‘big data’ project in health. The conference will also spotlight the challenges and state-of-the-art approaches to improving the quality and interoperability of clinical data. i~HD will play an important future role in the development and quality labelling of interoperability standards, bringing together clinical and research domain experts, with patients, to help ensure that future standards support patient care, learning health systems and clinical research.
The event is invitation only; those who wish to attend should express their interest via this form.