The Innovative Medicines Initiative, a public-private partnership between the European Union and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) was established in 2009 with the primary objective of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the medicine development process. The long-term aim is to bring more effective and safer innovative medicines to patients.

Since 2009, the IMI Executive Office (EO) has launched 9 calls for proposals consisting of 51 call topics that resulted in currently 40 ongoing public-private partnership projects, addressing a variety of bottlenecks in medicine development and more generally in health care. 7 more projects are expected to start later in 2013. The earliest IMI projects are now in their fourth year, and many projects have started to produce impressive results.

To help maximise the value of the public-private partnership IMI model, the need was identified to analyse the potential to exploit results of IMI projects.

The contractor is expected to carry out the following tasks in the initial contract period:

a. To bring all key and representative stakeholders together to form a ‘think tank/platform for stakeholder involvement to optimise project outcomes', in order to:

— look into results of the projects and assess how they can be implemented or considered in the medicines development and decision-making processes (within the current regulatory framework),

— identify potential legal, economic, ethical limitations and opportunities for full exploitation of these outcomes in the regulatory setting, clinical and health care practice and decision-making process (e.g. new classification of diseases, new clinical trial design and evidence, new benefit-risk evaluation methodologies, new access models),

— map and liaise with other similar initiatives (national, European and international) for further exploitation of results and to further leverage links between initiatives,

— identify common challenges or gaps from current IMI projects or outside landscape that can be addressed by future IMI projects,

— support definition of additional new IMI projects to ensure that all relevant stakeholders are considered and that the needs of the different stakeholder groups are adequately addressed, in particular with respect to demonstrating feasibility of new approaches to, e.g. clinical trials, benefit-risk evaluation, public health challenges, etc.

b. To organise meetings and workshops to discuss IMI project outputs, address opportunities and limitations for uptake into the different current frameworks and translation into standard of care, and make recommendations.

c. To prepare periodic progress reports and communicate conclusions reached that will regularly be updated as new findings emerge.

Complete tender specifications can be downloaded at http://www.imi.europa.eu/content/procurement