Case study report

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), world’s largest public-private partnership (PPP) in the health-care sector launched in 2008, was set-up to encounter the current crisis in the drug development sector. With the first IMI consortia heading towards the end of project duration, the time is there to inventory their added value. The outputs, i.e. the physical or virtual project deliverables, and the outcomes, i.e. the difference these deliverables could mean for science and the patient have been analyzed. Six case studies with a focus on IP and business opportunities revealed that those projects have started to produce impressive results, and that most deliverables were reached. Besides IP and business opportunities, many other extremely valuable assets were developed in those projects, such as large, extremely well-organized databases and biorepositories with associated pre-clinical and clinical information. The PPPs gathered unique scientific as well as managerial insights, developed several extremely valuable and workable tools to guarantee interoperability between partners/work packages and built up experiences in knowledge transfer. They construed databases and adopted diverse types of (digital) templates, specific uniform data and material sharing mechanisms, trust-based agreements and working models, not only applicable bilaterally but also within and between consortia. Such type of assets offer enormous potential for new PPPs in future calls, as well as for the IMI itself, and for regulatory, clinical and healthcare practices in general in order to strengthen and fasten the delivery of improved treatment options to society. The mindset present in the selected PPPs reflected open attitudes towards sharing materials and data between profit and non-profit institutes in order to speed up the development process and eventually market access. In addition, interactions between IMI consortia create opportunities for future value creation. Inter-IMI project collaborations having certain degrees of synergy could extend the deliverables of IMI’s projects. In order to maximize the impact of IMI projects on a long term and to foster all those valuable results, the time is there to design means to optimize the exploitation of the different types of assets, and to guarantee the sustainability of the research tools and databases generated in IMI’s PPPs. Recommendations are expressed to optimize the IMI as a role model for PPPs worldwide.status: publishe