IMI News
- IMI launches 100th project
- Registration open for ‘IMI: Celebrating 10 Years of Medical Innovations’
- Indicative future Call topics published
- Meet IMI at ESOF in July
News from our projects
- ‘The benefits of collaboration come through loud and clear’ – an interview with the GETREAL project coordinator
- RADAR-CNS platform wins award at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo
- MOPEAD project begins patient recruitment
- Join the DRIVE flu vaccine effectiveness network
- By tapping into Europe's wealth of health data, EMIF finds promising clues for Alzheimer’s
IMI launches 100th project
IMI has launched its 100th project in the form of Hypo-RESOLVE, a 4 year, EUR 26.8 million project on diabetes. The milestone comes as IMI celebrates its 10th anniversary with a series of events and activities. The IMI project portfolio is diverse; many projects, like Hypo-RESOLVE, focus on specific health issues such as diabetes, neurological conditions, cancer, auto-immune diseases, and infectious diseases. We also have projects that focus on broader challenges in drug development like drug and vaccine safety, big data in medical research and drug development, and the creation of research platforms and clinical networks. ‘The launch of our 100th project in our 10th anniversary year is a fantastic milestone for IMI,’ said IMI Executive Director Pierre Meulien. ‘Every project represents an international, multi-stakeholder commitment to working in a more open, collaborative way to solve some of the greatest challenges in medical research and innovation. Experience shows that this approach delivers results and I look forward to following Hypo-RESOLVE’s successes in the coming years.’
- Meet IMI’s 100 projects and search for projects by keyword, disease area, programme, etc.
- Check out the map of project participants
Registration open for ‘IMI: Celebrating 10 Years of Medical Innovations’
Registration is open for our event ‘IMI: Celebrating 10 Years of Medical Innovations’ in Brussels on the afternoon of 27 June. The event will feature both a plenary session as well as an exhibition, where attendees will have the opportunity to explore first-hand the results of IMI projects. The speakers include academics, industry scientists and patients from our projects, as well as high-level representatives of both the European Commission and the pharmaceutical industry.
For more details of participating speakers and projects, download the draft agenda.
Registration is free but obligatory via the form on the event web page.
Indicative future Call topics published
The following topics are currently under consideration for inclusion in future IMI Calls for proposals, and the draft topic texts are now available on the Future Topics page of the IMI website.
- Integrated research platforms enabling patient-centric drug development
- Blockchain enabled healthcare
- Microenvironment imposed signatures in tissue and liquid biopsies in immune mediated disease
- Emerging translational safety technologies and tools for interrogating human immuno-biology
- Development and validation of translational platforms in support of synaptopathy drug discovery
- Digital transformation of clinical trials endpoints
The newly-published draft texts also include the first topics in a new IMI antimicrobial resistance (AMR) accelerator programme. This programme consists of three pillars under which multiple projects are expected:
- Pillar A: Capability building network (CBN)
- Pillar B: Tuberculosis drug development network (TBDDN)
- Pillar C: Company-specific portfolio building networks (PBNs)
Currently, one two-stage topic is under consideration for inclusion in Pillar A; one two-stage topic is under consideration for inclusion in Pillar B; and one single-stage Call for proposals with seven topics is under consideration for inclusion in Pillar C.
IMI will hold webinars on all Call topics – the schedule will be published in the coming weeks.
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.
Meet IMI at ESOF in July
IMI will take part in ESOF 2018 in Toulouse, France with a session on the (re)-use of health data on Wednesday 11 July. Data holds the power to revolutionise healthcare, but it also entails unprecedented technical and ethical challenges. The IMI ESOF session will explore the fundamental challenge of helping stakeholders to appreciate the importance of sharing data. For patients and healthcare users, this is a particularly sensitive and crucial issue: who actually owns their health data and what ethical standards are in place to protect patients’ privacy? The session follows the PlayDecide format, a role-playing game to tackle controversial issues in a simple and effective way.
ESOF (the EuroScience Open Forum) is the largest interdisciplinary science meeting in Europe. Held every 2 years, ESOF brings together over 4 000 researchers, educators, business actors, policy makers and journalists from all over the world to discuss breakthroughs in science.
‘The benefits of collaboration come through loud and clear’ – an interview with the GETREAL project coordinator
Incorporating data from real-life clinical settings into drug development represents a serious challenge for pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and health authorities alike. By bringing together all key stakeholder groups to share their insights and know-how, IMI's GETREAL project developed new tools and resources for incorporating real-life data into drug development. These could increase confidence in new medicines and help to get them to patients more quickly. In an interview with the IMI Programme Office, project coordinator, Elaine Irving of GlaxoSmithKline explains the main project achievements, and why they wouldn’t have been possible without IMI. ‘We enabled open and transparent interaction with all the key stakeholders: health technology assessment bodies, regulators, patients, industry scientists, academia, and really unearthed all the different perspectives, which enabled us to work together on building solutions,’ she said. ‘It’s been a great collaboration, a great group. I stepped into this role only for the last year which was daunting because there was still a lot to be done. But in this last year we really focused and we really delivered. I think the team is pretty unique, they are all very driven and aligned on the need for the project and that energy has come through from start to finish.’
- Read the full interview
- Read the project factsheet
RADAR-CNS platform wins award at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo
A research platform developed by IMI’s RADAR-CNS project has won a ‘Best of Show’ award in the data integration and management category at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston, US in May. RADAR-CNS is working to develop new ways of measuring major depressive disorder, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis (MS) using wearable devices and smartphone technology. The project’s open source RADAR-base platform allows RADAR-CNS study participants to share their health data (e.g. from sensors and questionnaires) with clinicians and researchers in a secure way, keeping identifiable data local while linking to other non-identifiable data centrally. ‘RADAR-base provides an exciting, unique opportunity to empower research with data from both medical-grade and consumer-grade devices,’ said RADAR-base project lead Amos Folarin of King’s College London. ‘RADAR-base gives researchers and device manufacturers a place to build open systems to share, manage, host, and actually use these data to support the next generation of healthcare.’
- Read the BIO-IT World news story
MOPEAD project begins patient recruitment
IMI’s MOPEAD project has recruited its first patients in studies designed to identify people who may have early stage Alzheimer’s disease. Currently, many people with Alzheimer’s disease only receive a diagnosis when their disease is relatively advanced. The MOPEAD project is trialling different approaches, tools and mechanisms to engage communities and ensure people with Alzheimer’s disease receive the support they need as early as possible. The project is testing four broad strategies in Spain (where the first patients were recruited) as well as Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Sweden. People who take part in the study will undergo screening for mild cognitive impairment and, if needed, more extensive tests. If the tests show the person may have early stage Alzheimer’s disease, they will be offered support and resources including access to clinical trials as well as recommendations to improve their quality of life.
Join the DRIVE flu vaccine effectiveness network
The DRIVE project has launched a Call for tenders for organisations to join the project’s network on influenza vaccine effectiveness (IVE). DRIVE is working to create a European platform for studying brand-specific IVE and develop a governance model for scientifically robust, independent and transparent studies in a public-private partnership. The DRIVE partners include public health institutes, universities, research organisations, small and medium-sized enterprises and large pharmaceutical companies. The goal of the project’s Call for tenders, which is open to any European organisation, institution or network, is to support the sharing of existing IVE data and to establish new IVE studies. Successful applicants will become DRIVE Research Collaborators and will receive compensation from the project for data and analyses contributed and for participating in relevant project meetings.
- Deadline for submitting proposals: 25 June 2018
- Download the tender documents
By tapping into Europe's wealth of health data, EMIF finds promising clues for Alzheimer’s
Europe’s vast collection of electronic patient health records and medical research data holds important clues for battling major illnesses affecting millions. But this important resource is scattered and difficult to search, hampering efforts to make the most of it. IMI’s EMIF project addresses this problem by creating a secure online platform that consolidates metadata from a wide variety of sources, creating a one-stop shop – or ‘catalogue’ – to browse and compare what is available. The effort has already led to promising findings linked to Alzheimer's and obesity. For example, EMIF researchers have used the platform to probe whether drugs prescribed for certain conditions also lower a patient’s risk of developing dementia, the aim being to potentially repurpose – or reuse – such medications. Project coordinator, Simon Lovestone of the University of Oxford, noted that a “promising” initial analysis shows that some drugs do seem to do just that, adding to similar evidence from other studies. EMIF also enabled Lovestone and his team to rapidly locate 1 200 blood samples for research into developing a blood test to determine whether someone has Alzheimer’s before they develop symptoms so as to make clinical trials of anti-dementia drugs more effective by involving such individuals. Lovestone says EMIF saved about a decade of work. ‘Now we may or may not have a blood test at the end of it, but we will have done this super quickly and super cheaply compared to the alternative,’ he adds. ‘And if it turns out we do have a blood test that could help, then it could save huge amounts of money in clinical trials. And if those clinical trials lead to a new drug – well, that’s what we’re all working towards.’
- Read the full story