IMI is a collaborative effort between the pharmaceutical industry and the European Union. In fact, it is Europe's largest public-private initiative and its focus is to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for the benefit of patients and, by extension, society in general. Europe faces significant challenges to providing effective and timely treatment to its citizens and IMI seeks to resolve these issues by offering a platform through which the pharmaceutical industry, academia and regulators may collaborate to find suitable solutions. Pharmaceutical companies do not receive any direct financing for their input, but nevertheless commit their own resources to IMI projects.

Far from neglecting societal needs, the focus of IMI's Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) is on delivering ‘the right prevention and treatment for the right patient at the right time’. The SRA in fact sets out the health priorities to be addressed by IMI, which are aligned with the 2013 update of the World Health Organization’s Priority Medicines for Europe and the World report. These priorities include cancer, diabetes, osteoarthritis and cardiovascular disease, amongst others.

The intellectual property (IP) rules, have also been designed with the needs of society in mind, the aim being to promote an open innovation model and the speedy exploitation of results for the benefit of patients. These rules apply equally to all public and private partners. 

With regard to funding, the Court of Auditors’ legal role is to verify that EU funding has been appropriately distributed and not to audit EFPIA partners contributing to IMI, as they do not receive such funding.  Nevertheless EFPIA is committed to the transparency of the IMI process.  Transparency works in three stages.  Company methodologies for reporting contributions are certified by auditors and checked by IMI.  Companies are subject to an external audit, commissioned by IMI and IMI does send auditors into companies. As it is EFPIA - and not individual companies – that is the member of IMI, the EFPIA contribution as a whole is taken into account. While individual contributions are not made public, the total EFPIA contribution is.

Health systems across Europe face significant challenges.  Innovative medicines play a significant role in addressing these but no one sector has all the answers. It is through collaboration such as IMI that we can work together to continue to advance patient care.