The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has launched a €130m Call for proposals, focusing on Alzheimer’s disease amongst other areas.

The IMI is launching two new Calls for proposals with topics including Alzheimer’s disease, big data, vaccines, autoimmune disease, the blood-brain barrier, drug development, and the exploitation of IMI project results.

The total budget for the Calls exceeds €130m, half of which comes from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme and the remainder invested by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) and IMI associates.

IMI executive director Pierre Meulien said: “As these new Call topics show, there are still many challenges and unanswered questions in medical research and drug development. I am optimistic that by bringing together the best people from the public and private sectors, the Innovative Medicines Initiative will help to make progress in these important areas and contribute to accelerating medicines development.”

The Calls aim to develop a digital platform which draws upon smartphone, wearable and home sensor technologies to detect changes in cognitive and functional abilities.

FAIR data is defined as ‘findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable’, and its goal is to ensure that data from IMI projects is in alignment with these principles whilst securing the sustainability of the data.

Ultimately, such efforts would hope to enable the ease in which the scientific community is able to take advantage of data generated by IMI projects.

In order to address burdens upon healthcare systems, each funded topic will aim to design a vaccination programme for the elderly, in similarity to the one in operation for children.

Further proposal topics include funding into the European Health Data Network, ensuring drugs can cross the blood-brain barrier, a European screening centre, and efforts to resolve the exploitation of IMI project results.

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