The Council adopted a regulation establishing a Joint Technology Initiative (JTI) aimed at implementing research projects in innovative medicines, intended to strengthen the European pharmaceutical sector by accelerating the development of safe and more effective medicines for patients. The maximum Community contribution to both the research activities and the running costs for the period up to 2013 is set at EUR 1 billion.

The so-called Innovative Medicines Initiative ("IMI") is a unique public-private partnership between the pharmaceutical industry represented by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) and the European Communities represented by the European Commission.

The initiative will give pharmaceutical companies the possibility to collaborate and to find solutions for challenges in the biopharmaceutical drug development process which might be summarised as:

• Insufficient R&D investment
• Technological complexity
• Fragmented Research in Europe

The IMI stakeholders' Strategic Research Agenda identifies the principal research bottlenecks in the biopharmaceutical R&D process and sets forth recommendations to overcome these bottlenecks by focusing on four areas:

• Predicting safety
• Predicting efficacy
• Knowledge management
• Education and training

Both knowledge management and education & training aim to improve the information flow between the different phases of the drug development process.

Source and more information: http://www.imi-europe.org/  (EFPIA-IMI website) and http://www.imi.europa.eu/index_en.html