Introduction

The Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2) Joint Undertaking is a public-private partnershipbetween the European Commission and EFPIA (the European Federation of PharmaceuticalIndustry and Associations), implemented through public-private consortia to carry out research orother actions, where the EU provides funding and EFPIA and other members matching the EUfunding with their own contributions. IMI2 supports the development and implementation of precompetitiveresearch and innovation actions and any relevant accompanying measures to improveEuropean citizens' health and well-being.

Objective of the call

The present call will fund one Research and Innovation Action in each of the following topics:

Topic 1: Targeted immune intervention for the management of non-response and relapse.

Scope:identify new approaches to:

a) characterise human immune-mediated diseases;

b) profile andanalyse immune cells obtained from non-blood tissues;

c) discover individual disease and crossdiseasebiomarkers predictive of treatment response, non-response, relapse and flare-up;

d) performearly phase clinical trials (e.g. enriched study populations for certain molecular pathways; adaptiveand basket trial designs etc.) and identify potential novel patient-centric treatment approaches.

The focus will be on patients from well-characterised immune-mediated diseases. The ultimate goal is todevelop a translational research platform that will improve patient management and personalisedtreatment by identification/validation of predictive biomarkers for non-response, rapid progressionand remission.

Duration: 84 months.

Grant: 40,1 million euro.

Topic 2: Non-invasive clinical molecular imaging of immune cells.

Scope: to establish a consortiumthat can develop and validate a quantitative, non-invasive, immune cell imaging platform, whichincludes novel and target-specific molecular imaging agents, (hybrid) imaging modalities, andimage processing algorithms.

The topic aims to validate immune cell targets based on humanbiology and to facilitate precision medicine by identification and stratification of patients andprediction of therapeutic outcomes.

Duration: 60 months.

Grant: 15 million euro.

Topic 3: Development of a platform for federated and privacy-preserving machine learning insupport of drug discovery.

Scope: delivery of a federated and privacy-preserving machine learningplatform, initially validated on publicly accessible data, that is demonstrably safe enough andscalable enough to be deployed to a significant representation of private data in the actualpreclinical data warehouses of the participating major pharmaceutical companies in yearlyevaluation runs.

Duration: 36 months.

Grant: 8 million euro.

Topic 4: Centre of excellence – remote decentralised clinical trials (DCT).

Scope: to disaggregatethe current model of running clinical trials, defining building blocks and mapping new technologies(e.g. telemedicine, mobile health…) to support the new DCT model. The objective is to demonstratethe feasibility of running remote DCTs in Europe.

This will increase access of patients to clinicalresearch, enriching clinical trial data from a more diverse and representative patient population andimprove patient experience during the trials, with a higher speed of recruitment and better retention.

Duration: 60 months.

Grant: 19 million euro.

Eligible applicants

Legal entities established in a Member State or Country associated to Horizon 2020 that fall withinone of the following categories:

a) micro, small and medium-sized enterprises and other companieswith an annual turnover of EUR 500 million or less, the latter not being affiliated entities ofcompanies with an annual turnover of more than 500 million;

b) secondary and higher educationestablishments;

c) non-profit organisations, including those carrying out research or technologicaldevelopment as one of their main objectives or those that are patient organisations.

Partnership criteria

The consortium must include at least three legal entities established in 3 EU Member States orHorizon 2020 associated countries.

Funding

Coverage of 100% of the project costs.

More information at

http://www.imi.europa.eu/apply-funding/open-calls/imi2-call-14