Partnerships and collaborations

Public-Private Partnerships

We work with the world’s biggest public-private partnership organisation in the life sciences as co-leaders of the latest pain initiative.

The Pain Group of the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2) unites European pharmaceutical companies dedicated to better understanding, treating and managing pain. The framework of the public-private partnership enables a portfolio of pain projects addressing a broad spectrum of relevant challenges together with the best skilled public consortia of expert academics, hospitals, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and patient groups.

The IMI is a public-private partnership between the EU and EFPIA (European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations) companies and is working to improve health by speeding up the development of and access to the next generation of medicines, particularly in areas of unmet medical and social need.

 

Deciphering pain – paving the way for safe, effective Treatments
The first collaborative project with the IMI2 started in April 2017, with the aim of generating predictive research approaches to guide the discovery of disease-modifying analgesics. Over the course of 3 years, the Modelling Neuron-Glia Networks into a Drug Discovery Platform for Pain Efficacious Treatments (NGN-PET) project will investigate neuron-glia interactions by developing authentic cellular (co-culture) assays using neuronal and glial cell types derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). This project will increase our knowledge of pain targets and pathways, and generate predictive approaches for the discovery of new pain treatments.

 

Improving the care of acute and chronic pain patients – starting soon
We are currently planning a second project that seeks to improve the care of patients suffering from acute or chronic pain starting in early 2018. We look forward to the ground-breaking results from these and other IMI2-supported pain projects in the years to come.

 

Creating a network of partnerships – future developments
We will join three other IMI2 projects to establish networks of specialists starting in 2018: “Patient perspectives in medicines lifecycle” (PARADIGM), the “European Screening Center Unprecedented Leverage of Attractive Biology“ (ESCulab) and “Linking digital assessment of mobility to clinical endpoints to drive regulatory acceptance and clinical practice” (DIAMOND).