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One-year IMI-PainCare
Sharing insights into the IMI-PainCare project’s achievements at EFIC
“I’m delighted that IMI-PainCare was able to share its ambitious goals with such a huge audience”
The European Pain Federation (EFIC) congress is one of the biggest events in the calendar for healthcare professionals and researchers in pain. With 3,500 participants from more than 90 countries, it offers a unique opportunity to exchange knowledge and discuss the latest advances among pain experts from around the world. That’s why a team from the IMI-PainCare project attended the event in Valencia, Spain, in September to share information and create awareness about their achievements. Since the project was established one year ago, it has been bringing together representatives from 40 organisations – including academia, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), pain societies, patient organisations and companies from the pharmaceutical industry. Through close collaboration, they’ve already achieved some impressive progress that was presented to a huge audience at EFIC.
Approximately 300 EFIC participants attended the workshop, “IMI-PainCare – Improving the Care of Patients Suffering from Acute or Chronic Pain”. Speakers including Prof. Winfried Meissner (University Clinic Jena), Prof. Rolf-Detlef Treede (University Heidelberg) and Dr. Jens Nagel (Bayer AG) explained the overall concept and shared some of the first results. Among many achievements, IMI-PainCare has successfully finalised study protocols for six clinical trials – supported by valuable input from advocates from the consortium’s three patient organisations. Pain experts also had the chance to discuss the project’s work in more detail by visiting the IMI-PainCare booth, where they could gather additional detail about three sub-projects: PROMPT, BioPain and TRiPP. As a co-leader in the consortium, Grünenthal employees helped to present the project’s achievements at its booth.
As a particular highlight, the IMI-PainCare team had the opportunity to discuss its goals and projects with representatives from the European Medicines Agency (EMA), as well as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the American National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the future, these agencies will support the consortium in defining the best strategy for qualifying and integrating project outputs into regulatory practices in EU and US. On top of this, the NIH is going to further strengthen scientific interactions with IMI-PainCare consortium to improve the quality and uniformity of research and clinical practice. By entering into collaboration and reaching out to the global pain community, the IMI-PainCare team is able to move closer to its goal of accelerating the development of innovative medicines – and improving care for patients with acute and chronic pain worldwide.
You can view a recording of the livestream of the workshop presentations here. And you can also visit the IMI-PainCare website
“We’re excited about our progress towards accelerating innovative medicines for pain patients.”
Acknowledgement
This project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (IMI2 JU) under grant agreement No. 777500. (www.imi.europa.eu)
This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
Disclaimer
The statements and opinions presented here reflect the author's view and neither IMI nor the European Union, EFPIA, or any Associated Partners are responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.
This communication reflects the views of the IMI-PainCare consortium and neither IMI nor the European Union and EFPIA are liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.
IMI-PainCare in a nutshell
Major goals of IMI-PainCare are (i) to provide a comprehensive set of novel validated tools to quantify multi-dimensional outcome parameters and predictors to enable stratification of patients for individualized treatments, and (ii) to develop valuable tools to evaluate the success of pain therapies in real-world clinical practice and in clinical trials, and to support drug discovery.