Launching IHI’s first projects
While IHI’s first year saw a focus on getting this exciting partnership up and running so that we could launch our first calls for proposals, the highlight of our second year has been the start of the very first IHI projects.
Bringing together partners from the different industry sectors involved in IHI, as well as representatives of universities, small and medium-sized enterprises, patient organisations, and others, the new projects are turning IHI’s vision of a cross-sector, public-private research and innovation community into a reality.
The first projects, from IHI – call 1, started before the summer and draw on expertise from the pharmaceutical, medical technology and imaging sectors to tackle diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. Through these projects IHI is well placed to contribute to key EU policies including the Beating Cancer Plan, and the planned European Health Data Space (EHDS).
Now, we’re in the process of launching the projects from IHI calls 2 and 3, which address disease areas such as heart disease and diabetes, and cross-cutting issues such as improving various aspects of patient care and the development of medical devices. We’ll be spotlighting these new projects on our website in the coming weeks, so watch this space!
Consolidating the new partnership
Meanwhile IHI continued to consolidate the partnership, launching three further calls for proposals with topics on issues as diverse as the environmental impacts of medicines, clinical trial design, and synthetic data, to name just a few. Looking to the future, the draft topics for our next calls are already online.
We have also boosted our Ideas Incubator, which allows individuals and organisations alike to send us their ideas for IHI call topics.
Celebrating results from ongoing Innovative Medicines Initiative projects
Of course, IHI builds on the successes of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which ran from 2008 to 2020. Remarkably, the partnerships forged through some of the earliest IMI projects are still going strong and delivering results, even though the IMI funding of these projects ended several years ago.
For example, scientists from U-BIOPRED, which was launched under the very first IMI call for proposals, recently published findings on severe asthma in children, while a group from the DIRECT project (from IMI1 – call 3) used data from the project to pinpoint genetic variants associated with a good response to diabetes drugs called GLP-1 agonists.
The fact that many older projects are still going strong and delivering knowledge and resources is testament to the value of the public-private approach, as exemplified by IMI and expanded under IHI to include cross-sector aspects.