The innovative medicines initiative: Beyond the ‘Closed Club’ of innovation and towards more equitable patient access
12.07.13
IMI-1, a public-private partnership between EFPIA and the European Commission, has already shown great success in advancing R&D and supporting collaborative research efforts. IMI-2 will expand on this as it seeks to further R&D, advance trends in personalised medicines, and address the regulatory context of drugs development. I would like to highlight this last point, which is essential to IMI-2 achieving its goal: Speed the translation of innovation to patients, ensuring the right treatment for the right patient at the right time.
I’ve said before that the needs of patients are ultimately what drives my industry. There’s no point in developing innovative medicines unless patients can actually use them – all patients. Equitable access to innovation is a key concern. That’s why I was also glad to see the World Health Organization’s Priority Medicines for Europe and the World 2013 update, published this week, call for alignment between public health needs and incentives for biomedical innovation. Bringing these two objectives together is essential in securing greater equality in patient access to medicines. The rate of uptake in new products is going down in the EU in comparison to the rest of the world. This is a problem that needs to be addressed and considering incentives for innovation alongside health needs is a step towards that end.
The WHO report’s comments on research priorities and incentivisation are useful for my industry as it determines its own research agendas. “Looking at the strategic research agenda, it’s largely based on the WHO report,” noted Ruxandra Draghiai-Akli, Director of the Health Directorate at the Research DG of the European Commission, who was among those joining me in support of IMI-2 yesterday. Also present were Michel Goldman, Executive Director of IMI; Novartis CEO and EFPIA Vice-President Joe Jiminez; and Peter Andersen, Senior Vice President Lundbeck and Chair of EFPIA’s Research Director Group.
The diversity of this group reflects what I’ve said time and again over the past months: We need different views and stakeholders to come together if we are to meet the health challenges ahead of us. WHO also stresses this need, and I was pleased to see it mention the pharmaceutical industry – alongside EU Member States, institutions and decision-makers – as a ‘crucial audience’ in its Priority Medicines Report.
IMI embodies this collaborative approach. IMI-1 has set the tone and I expect to see IMI-2 follow suit, fostering projects supporting open innovation, pooling data, and a diversity of participants from industry, academia and patient groups, among others. “What we are expecting from this joint undertaking – it’s really a change in paradigm,” noted Director Draghiai-Akli, emphasizing the move of Horizon2020 – the funding framework supporting IMI – towards greater flexibility, less red tape, and an approach that goes beyond “the idea of the closed club”.
IMI-2 offers another opportunity to see what is possible when we leave behind the “closed club” and collaborate. One of IMI2’s goals is to classify four more diseases on a molecular basis. If we can achieve this, it means four more opportunities to potentially get more targeted treatments to patients, and to examine the benefits of such targeted treatments. I look forward to seeing where our collaboration – and science – takes us.
