Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November/December 2007 - (Page 16)

16 Brussels Report Nov/Dec 2007 Pharmaceutical Executive Europe Great Expectations? The regulators are full of good ideas when it comes to new initiatives, but the industry knows better than to expect any real advances. Reflector reports on the EIT and the IMI, the latest proposals struggling to leave the launching pad. nyone whose children started university this autumn will be glad they didn’t apply to study at the European Institute of Technology (EIT) — because it looks like it will be a long time before it opens its doors. This ambitious venture is the brainchild of European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who decided nearly two years ago that what Europe needed to boost its flagging capacity for innovation was an equivalent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He described it as “a good example and symbol of our determination to help drive Europe into the knowledge age.” The idea is that the institute will pull together top organisations, the finest talents, and the best material resources, and — as Barroso puts it — “together, they will use their interdisciplinary capacity and come up with innovative solutions to the most urgent problems that confront us all.” It will offer, he says, “a framework in which partners in education, research and innovation can create a favourable environment for the emergence of excellence.” All very laudable. But the trouble with fine flows of rhetoric is that it is hard to match them with nuts and bolts, pounds and pence, bricks and mortar. And the EIT is suffering the same fate as the rhetoric that engendered it. It has had only lukewarm support from the European Parliament and EU ministers, and it still remains a distant prospect with a minimal budget. It’s symptomatic of a pathology that has been sweeping the European Union over recent years. Europe’s political leaders have a disconcerting tendency to respond to global competitive challenges by inventing new institutions, platforms, joint technology initiatives, research areas, and forums — all splendid vehicles for ringing A declarations, but few of them providing much practical assistance to the high-tech industries that are the front-line troops in the innovation battle. As any European pharmaceutical executive knows, research investment, product development, sales figures and bottom-line profits are governed by factors much more tangible than the imaginative flights of a speechwriter. A growing sense of cynicism, even alienation, is detectable in drug industry circles every time the latest politicians’ placebo appears on the public prescription pad. Innovative Medicines Initiative There are plenty of these starry-eyed European initiatives in the pharmaceutical arena. One of the inflated concepts currently floating around on the stream of hot air from the politicians that produced it is the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). This is billed as “a novel kind of pan-European public private partnership between universities, hospitals, public authorities, patient organisations, clinical centres and pharmaceutical companies with the aim to boosting biomedical research and the development of new therapies.” Its audacity knows no bounds. According to its own publicity, it is going to “harness the know-how and expertise available across Europe’s biopharmaceutical sector,” and “reinvigorate the pharmaceutical sector in Europe” so as to “lead to a better quality of life for European citizens.” Not much faster than the EIT, it would appear. The idea has been around for well over two years, and is still heavier on publicity than on practical progress. The summit of EU leaders last June “invited

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November/December 2007

Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November/December 2007
Contents
From the Editor
News and Analysis
Calendar
Brussels Report
A Year in Pharma
Working With IQWiG
Developing Strategies for Developing Countries
Due Pharmacovigilance
Streamlining Synergies
A New Europe for CROs
The Mix
Last Word

Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - November/December 2007