Public-Private Partnerships

We work with the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the world’s biggest public-private partnership in the life sciences. We are also co-leadering the IMI Pain Group, which is one of the largest pain-research consortia worldwide.

The Pain Group of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) unites European pharmaceutical companies dedicated to better understanding, treating and managing pain. The framework of the public-private partnership enables a portfolio of pain projects addressing a broad spectrum of relevant challenges together with the best skilled public consortia of expert academics, hospitals, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and patient groups.

The IMI is a public-private partnership between the EU and EFPIA (European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations) companies and is working to improve health by speeding up the development of and access to the next generation of medicines, particularly in areas of unmet medical and social need.

IMI-PainCare – Improving the care of patients suffering from acute or chronic pain

To improve the care of patients with acute or chronic pain, a consortium of academia, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), pain societies, patient organisations and the pharmaceutical industry launched the research project “IMI-PainCare – Improving the care of patients suffering from acute or chronic pain” in April 2018.

We are proud to co-lead this important project together with Rolf-Detlef Treede from the University of Heidelberg. IMI-PainCare comprises three sub-projects PROMPT, BioPain and TRiPP, across all phases of the pharmaceutical value chain – from early research to clinical practice – addressing major challenges in the care of patients suffering from acute or chronic pain in a complementary manner. It is anticipated that tools will be validated that will allow patient stratification and enrichment as recommended by the recent EMA/CHMP/970057/2011 guideline on pain treatment.

More information: https://www.imi-paincare.eu/

Bio2Treat – Biometric and biological data for diagnosis and therapy in pain patients

Grünenthal and the University Hospital RWTH Aachen have entered into a research collaboration to develop new treatment approaches for patients with neuropathic pain. The project Bio 2Treat - biometric and biological data for the diagnosis and therapy of pain patients - runs over three years. It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with a total of € 1.52 million as part of the action field "Health Economy in the Health Research Framework Program" (Grant No. 13GW0334B). The project, coordinated by Prof. Angelika Lampert from the Institute of Physiology at the University Hospital RWTH Aachen together with Grünenthal, involves the professors Roman Rolke (Palliative Medicine), Martin Zenke (Cell Biology), Ingo Kurth (Human Genetics) and Andreas Schuppert (Computational Biomedicine) of the University Hospital RWTH Aachen.

Within the project, patient data from different sources will be collected and merged to enable new therapeutic approaches. This includes subjective patient reported outcomes, and biometrical patients data collected via a smart watch/phone combination, stem cell research, artificial intelligence, innovative methods for pain assessment, and conventional clinical examinations.

All data obtained will be combined in a special software and analysed by self-learning algorithms to allow significant improvement of diagnosis, prognosis and therapy in future.