Innovative medicines on the horizon

The Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking (IMI) and the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) have signed an agreement to enhance the use of information in order to develop safer and more effective innovative medicines. Rebecca Kush, President and CEO of CDISC, stated; ‘this will be an invaluable mutually beneficial partnership that can generate standards-based innovations to streamline the development of new therapies and medical knowledge that will benefit patient

IMI is the world’s largest public-private partnership initiative that aims to speed up the development of medicines by supporting collaborative projects involving SMEs, pharmaceutical companies, academic experts and regulators in order to promote research and innovation.

CDISC has developed consensus-based data formats that crucially provide a common global ‘language’ to enable the collection, use and sharing of data, designing data formats to support specific disease areas which have included in the past few years Alzheimer’s and tuberculosis, amongst others.

The partnership will pave the way for further development in this vital area of research and opens up many new collaboration opportunities. As IMI Executive Director Michel Golman put it; ‘As IMI projects will be more and more based on the analysis of large data sets, the harmonisation and the standardisation of data made possible through the collaboration with CDISC will be critical to the success of IMI.’

Published: Thursday, 15th December 2011 by Ellen Haggan