Brussels to boost Europe’s R&D with public funds
pharmafile | May 8, 2008 | News story | Research and Development |
The European Commission is due to spend Euro 2 billion of public money to see the continent return to its rank of global leader in innovation.
It has called on academics and researchers to come forward with new ideas to revitalise the region's increasingly sluggish drug discovery efforts, and will reward the top proposals with research grants to source new medicines for Europe.
The Commission has partnered the European pharmaceutical trade organisation EFPIA in a scheme called the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
European Science and Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik underlined the goals of the initiative: "IMI is about pooling public and private efforts so that Europe can be a big player.
"We want to be the best in the world and become a champion's league for biopharmaceutical research by moving from individual project funding, to joint programme funding involving industry and public stakeholders."
The partners stressed that ten years ago, seven out of ten new medicines originated from Europe – a figure that has now dropped to three out of ten.
The remedy this the Commission is backing a new industry-led strategy to overcome what four main obstacles to the drug development process.
These are the difficulty predicting safety, the difficulty in predicting efficacy, poor knowledge management and gaps in education and training.
The scheme also has backing from the European Parliament, and a budget of Euro 2 billion to spend by 2013. The selection process for the first research projects to be funded are planned to start before the end of this year.
The process
The money will be divided into grants and awarded to promising research and development projects for new medicines.
Small companies and academic institutes have been asked for proposals, which will be independently peer reviewed before given funding, for disease areas of unmet need specific to the European population.
To receive a grant, the parties will team up in public-private research partnerships, where each group must include one academic institute or small company and two companies that are already members of EFPIA.
Public funding will go only to the academic institutions while industry members have to support themselves, and detailed official agreements for the partnerships are to be drawn up.
Arthur Higgins, President of EFPIA, stressed the need to for a partnership approach to address the main cause of delays in drug innovation: "The challenges behind innovation are complex, and the decline in the number of new drugs is due to a combination of scientific, regulatory and economic factors. We as an industry are ready to play our part in bringing forward medical innovation but cannot solve all these issues by ourselves".
Money will first be given to projects in areas of brain disorders, metabolic and inflammatory diseases and then, beyond 2013, the IMI will also cover cancer and infectious diseases.
Prevalent disease areas outside of Europe will not be considered for research.
Submissions should be sent to the IMI Joint Undertaking, more information on which can be found online at http://imi.europa.eu
