The EU backed Innovative Medicines Initiative has updated its strategic research agenda, outlining strategies to overcome 'bottlenecks' to efficient R&D for new medicines.
The bottlenecks to developing new drugs are; predicting safety, predicting efficacy, bridging gaps in knowledge management and bridging gaps in education and training.
That's the view of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), an EU initiative "to remove bottlenecks hampering the efficiency of the development of new medicines, and where research is the key, thereby enabling the European biopharmaceutical industry to become world leaders".
The idea is that "by pooling resources from all stakeholders (industry, academia, SMEs, regulatory authorities, healthcare providers, patient organisations), this initiative is expected to provide faster access to better medicines for European citizens".
IMI has just put out a revised version (pdf file here) of its Strategic Research Agenda (SRA). This offers recommendations to address each of the bottlenecks. The SRA's recommendations – fashionably described in terms of ‘Four-Pillars’ – claim to "address the principal causes of delay in the biomedical R&D process":
- Predictivity of Safety Evaluation
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Predictivity of Efficacy Evaluation
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Knowledge Management
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Education and Training
The note about this on the EU's Cordis service says that "The European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) will have joint responsibility for a new organisation to overcome these bottlenecks. The body will have the power to award grants to European Public-Private Collaborations to follow the strategy laid-out in the SRA, designed to overcome the bottlenecks to efficient R&D."
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