Boosting R&D in areas of unmet healthcare need via collaboration: the example of the Innovative Health Initiative

<p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" class="first" dir="auto" id="d16164772e65">The Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) Joint Undertaking(https://www.ihi.europa.eu/) is a public-private partnership and, with an overall budget of 2.4 billion EUR, is the largest initiative of its kind in the health space. IHI builds on the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), expanding IMI’s focus on pharmaceutical research to a broader, cross-sectoral approach in health innovation, addressing evolving scientific and societal needs. It is a unique framework bringing together the private health industry sectors (pharma, biotech, vaccines, and medical technologies) and public partners (e.g academia, healthcare professionals and providers, patients and carers, regulators, health technology assessment bodies, payers) in research projects in areas of unmet public health need. Funded projects are precompetitive collaborative “consortia”, leveraging at scale the multidisciplinary skills of all members, public European funding, and in-kind industry resources (experts’ time, setting and running of assays and models, clinical studies, etc.) towards the achievement of agreed research objectives. Working in the IHI precompetitive trusted framework, collaborating, and sharing data (among companies and with public actors) allow to learn together to overcome key research and innovation bottlenecks, instead of working in silos. This enabled uniquely the IHI projects to generate, curate and make further available an increasing volume and diversity of high-quality data and to develop important infrastructure generating impacts beyond the single projects. In my talk I will explain how IHI projects are generated and present some examples of how they are fostering progress in areas of unmet public health need. I will also provide some information on opportunities for collaboration and on upcoming future initiatives.