The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) between the pharmaceutical industry represented by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) and the European Communities represented by the European Commission.

On 30 October 2009 the 2nd call for proposals of IMI will be launched officially. Concerning the funding available for the new call, there will be 76.8 million provided by the European Commission with at least matching in kind contributions to the projects of the participating EFPIA companies. Nine topics will be covered, related to knowledge management, infectious and inflammatory diseases, and cancer.

The IMI Call is a two-stage process, the first one being an Expression of Interest (EoI) expressed by scientists from academia, SME, patient organisations and others. One EoI per Call topic is generally invited to submit a full project proposal together with the EFPIA industry members. The submission deadline for EoIs will probably be in january 2010.

An information day held on Tuesday, 17 Nov 09 at Brussels-Expo will provide an overview of the IMI and all practical information to be involved in IMI projects, focusing on the submission of expressions of interest for the 2nd call.

For more information please refer to the IMI web site.

A comparison between FP7 and IMI funding as well as information on the IMI IRP policy which clearly aims at a swift dissemination and sharing of the results can be found on the Euresearch web site.