The Innovative Medicines Platform sets its roadmap for 2024 with the aim of turning Spain into a major biomedical innovation hub
The Technological Platform for Innovative Medicines – whose Coordination Committee is made up of 10 representatives from the pharmaceutical industry and 10 representatives from public research – defines its action plan for 2024 and debates advances and new developments in preclinical and clinical research and the use of data, among others.
The Annual Conference of Biomedical Research Platforms – the big event for biomedical research in Spain – will be held this year in Barcelona on 29 May.
Farmaindustria.es
Bringing clinical trials closer to primary care health centres and achieving greater participation of all autonomous communities in clinical research with new drugs will be two of the main objectives set this year for biomedical research in Spain. This was made clear at the annual meeting of the Coordination Committee of the Spanish Technological Platform for Innovative Medicines, a working team made up of 10 heads of research from the pharmaceutical industry and 10 representatives from public research centres in our country, which has been working since 2005 with the common goal of promoting research into medicines through public-private collaboration.
At its annual meeting, held at Farmaindustria’s headquarters, the members of this Committee set the action plan for 2024, with a special focus on activities to promote public-private collaboration. In addition, the Platform’s activities in preclinical research, clinical research, use of data, internationalisation and transversal dissemination actions were extensively reviewed. Thus, within the actions to be carried out in the area of clinical research, the director of Farmaindustria’s Clinical and Translational Research Department, Amelia Martín Uranga, highlighted some initiatives to be developed this year, such as a pilot project for monitoring clinical trials to be carried out in Andalusia; an initiative to achieve greater agility and reduction of bureaucracy for the implementation of these trials, or the updating of the Guide to Excellence for conducting clinical trials in Hospital Pharmacy, among others.
In the field of preclinical research, researcher Mabel Loza, Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, detailed the progress being made by the Kaertor Foundation in defining a public-private preclinical research programme in Spain.
Advances in the use of data in R&D
The use of data in the measurement of health outcomes and in the research of new drugs was also extensively discussed at the meeting. Thus, the director of the Biomedical Informatics Research Programme at Pompeu Fabra University and co-chair of the Platform Committee, Ferran Sanz, presented the results of the European eTransafe project, a pioneering initiative aimed at sharing comprehensive data on the safety of medicines; as well as the characteristics of the new European consortium IHI (Innovative Health Initiative).
Dr. Miguel Ángel Mayer, senior researcher in Biomedical Informatics at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, explained the advances in three of the main European research networks in RWE (Real World Evidence): Darwin EU, EHDEN (European Health Data and Evidence Network) and TriNetX. Likewise, Joaquín Dopazo, director of the Clinical Bioinformatics Area of the Progreso y Salud de Andalucía Foundation, spoke about the updating of the iRWD infrastructure for the secure analysis of clinical data. Finally, Dr. Jesús María Hernández Rivas, director of the Oncological Cytogenetics Unit of the Cancer Research Centre of the University of Salamanca, presented the current situation of the European Health Data Space and updated the data of the Harmony project, a European consortium coordinated from Spain, which aims to use big data to produce information that helps health professionals in decision-making to improve the care of patients with haematological tumours.
Barcelona to host the annual biomedical R&D meeting
The participants in the meeting also discussed the topics that will make up the agenda of the next 17th Annual Conference of Biomedical Research Platforms, the great annual event for biomedical research in Spain, co-organised by Farmaindustria, Asebio, Nanomed, Fenin and Veterindustria. The event will be held in Barcelona on 29 May 2024.
