The European Commission is poised to agree a $2.9 billion partnership this week designed to win back Europe’s place as a center for global medical innovation, The Financial Times reports.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative, financed equally by pharma and the EC, will support research by academic and industry groups over seven years designed to speed up the predictable safety and efficacy testing. The move aims to boost collaboration between commercial companies, universities and regulators to more rapidly develop “pre-competitive” tests and accelerate the launch of innovative drugs, the FT writes.

It reflects long-standing worries that Europe has been losing out in medical innovation to the US, and increasingly to parts of Asia, where large pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotech groups are more often placing their research and development functions. The IMI partly mirrors the FDA’s critical path initiative, but European drugmakers say their version has greater input from industry, and more clearly defined funding, the paper reports.

“This is the largest public-private partnership for biomedical research in Europe. It clearly gives us a chance to catch up with the US,” says Arthur Higgins, head of Bayer Healthcare of Germany and current president of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, the main EU trade body. “We have not made the progress that is necessary in drug development to ensure a steady supply of new drugs. This is a real attempt to remove the bottlenecks. We need to step back and find a new paradigm.”

The IMI will focus on a number of diseases which researchers believe reflect the greatest disease burden and scientific challenges, including brain disorders, cancer and inflammatory, metabolic and infectious diseases. Any innovative ideas developed through the projects will be openly communicated to researchers but subject to intellectual property protection and payment if they are developed commercially, according to the FT.

Analysts argue that the high rate of innovation in the US is partly the result of substantial venture capital and a high investor appetite for risk, researchers who move easily between academic and business, and relatively high prices for new drugs, the paper writes. It also benefits from large numbers of local and foreign scientists trained in US universities, and substantial government funding including $30 billion a year from the National Institutes of Health.

Source: The Financial Times