IMI – Innovative Medicines Initiative

A pharmaceutical company's greatest assets are the ideas and expertise of its staff. Experts from all kinds of disciplines in the fields of natural sciences, medicine and technology work hand in hand. After all, developing a new drug is a complex process.

Most university courses in pharmacy, chemistry or medicine that train students for a later profession as a pharmacist, chemistry lab technician or physician focus primarily on scientific or medical content, so that most graduates are inadequately prepared for the complex demands of modern drug development. This applies especially to those who have studied in the new EU accession countries. Practical, international and interdisciplinary approaches to training are needed here.

The IMI therefore wants to create a pan-European platform for education and training in the pharmaceutical field that covers the entire cycle of a drug's development – from basic research to application monitoring after the product has been granted marketing approval.

The aim is to develop MSc courses and PhD programs that are as practical as possible and to accredit them according to the ECTS system, so that individual study qualifications and degrees are recognized throughout Europe. The courses will be taught jointly by lecturers from industry and universities. In addition they will be also made available via an e-learning platform, making them accessible to students from all EU countries, irrespective of their location. The EMTRAIN (European Medicines Research Training Network) project coordinates these activities. The first specific courses are being developed in three separate projects – PHARMATRAIN, SAFESCIMET and EU2P.

"The aim is for the new study programs to give the participants a profound and realistic insight into the drug development process and an additional qualification that will also enable them to take on other tasks in companies, regulatory agencies and administrations in future," says Dr. Matthias Gottwald, who is responsible for EMTRAIN at Bayer Schering Pharma. "They will be interesting, profile-building additional courses for the universities that offer these programs." The pharmaceutical companies will also benefit, of course: they can recruit more highly qualified people and give staff already working for them further training in specific fields by enabling them to participate in individual training modules.

More than 60 companies, institutions and universities from across Europe have joined together for this project. The academic partners include the universities of Oxford, Manchester and Vienna, as well as the Helmholtz Zentrum (Munich) and the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm). The project is being coordinated by AstraZeneca.

EMTRAIN's main task is to support all educational and training projects under the auspices of the IMI – for example by providing quality control of the courses to be developed under the IMI, assistance with e-learning courses and the accreditation of programs, and with related development work in certain countries (e.g. in eastern and southeastern Europe where there have been few if any such training opportunities up to now). "We want 'IMI-certified' to become recognized as a quality criterion for education and training in the field of pharmaceutical medicine," says Dr. Gottwald.

e new qualifications and degrees. On the other, the company will work on the Europe-wide expansion of the newly developed educational and training programs to ensure that the courses are also accessible in countries that do not have a strong pharmaceutical industry of their own. "Virtually all pharmaceutical companies have branches in these countries, and it is important for us to also have qualified staff there – particularly for implementing study courses and to hold a constructive dialog with regulatory agencies in the respective country," says Dr. Gottwald.

PHARMATRAIN (Pharmaceutical Medicine Training Program) is one of the IMI's first three specific training projects. It is developing a master's degree course that reflects the entire drug-development process – from early research to market approval.

The modules to be offered will cover subjects like the search for new targets (for active ingredients in the body) and lead structures (active ingredient classes), preclinical development (toxicology, kinetics and assessing the safety of active ingredients), clinical development (clinical pharmacology, biometrics and statistics for evaluating study data), and issues of marketing approval, health- economic evaluation and price reimbursement.

In Germany, such a course is currently only offered by the University of Duisburg-Essen. In addition to this university, the academic partners will include the universities of Basel, Brussels, Vienna, Belgrade, Cardiff and Budapest, Kings College London and the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm), among others. Project coordination is in the hands of the University of Basel; co-coordinator on the part of the 15 participating pharmaceutical companies is AstraZeneca.

You can soon read more here about the EU2P and SAFESCIMET educational and training projects.