All news

Stakeholders request urgent revision of Innovative Medicines Joint Technology Initiative (IMI)

The Innovative Medicines Joint Technology Initiative (IMI) was launched by the European Commission in May 2007. From the beginning, major stakeholder groups – including EUA – have expressed concerns about IMI’s intellectual property rights policy and its funding model.

These concerns have been repeated on several occasions and have been transmitted to the IMI Member States Group, the IMI Joint Undertaking (JU) Governing Board and the European Commission.  The IMI JU is currently reviewing its intellectual property policy and the funding rules for reimbursement of indirect costs.

For this reason, a group of IMI stakeholders (including EUA) has decided to publish a joint statement to provide useful input in this review process and ensure that these concerns are addressed.

The IMI JU has already launched two calls for proposals and is preparing a third call. Participation in the first two calls has been well below potential, because many organisations – SMEs, research organisations and universities – have not participated fully as a result of concerns regarding the complex and potentially un-balanced IMI IP policy and unattractive funding model.

The Statement notes that IMI funding model needs to be sufficiently competitive to attract the best players and to allow SMEs to engage effectively in large numbers. IMI funding rules should also be modelled on FP7 funding rules and the starting point for calculating funding rates should be coverage of the full costs of research. As EUA has already stressed on numerous occasions, the current 20% cap on the reimbursement of indirect research costs ignores economic reality and must be lifted as a matter of urgency.

The stakeholder organisations believe that the necessary reforms must be implemented in time for the third IMI call for proposals. This is essential if IMI is to achieve its objectives of fostering long-lasting and fruitful collaborations between research organisations, SMEs, universities and pharmaceutical companies and if it is serious about creating biomedical R&D leadership in Europe to benefit patients and society.

Please click here to download the full statement.