The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has launched a new project called GETREAL that will investigate new ways of integrating data from real life settings, such as clinics, into drug development. This will assist healthcare decision makers when deciding how best to grant patients access to a new treatment and help pharmaceutical companies to take better decisions during drug development.
Once a new drug has been developed, it must be reviewed by both the marketing authorisation and health technology assessment (HTA) bodies. HTA organisations assess the drug's 'relative effectiveness', which is the extent to which a treatment does more good than harm when compared to one or more alternative treatments when provided under normal healthcare circumstances.
Ideally, HTA organisations need data from real life settings, yet there is little guidance on how to generate real world data and integrate this into drug development before launch. This is a serious issue - insufficient evidence supporting relative effectiveness may delay or restrict patient access to new treatments. The challenge, therefore, is to incorporate innovative study designs into the earlier stages of drug research and development, to ensure both regulators and HTA bodies get the data they need. This is where the GETREAL project comes in.
The project brings together for the first time all key stakeholders (industry, academia, regulatory agencies, health technology assessment bodies, healthcare budget holders, and patient groups) to share their perspectives and insights on how effectiveness/relative effectiveness can best be assessed in HTA decision-making processes, and so will pave the way for advancing the development of new approaches for incorporating real life data into drug development.
IMI Executive Director Michel Goldman said: "Collaboration between these diverse groups can be sensitive. By bringing them together in the safe harbour offered by IMI, GETREAL is in a unique position to reach a greater consensus on these issues to improve the efficiency of R&D and the decision-making processes."
Working together, these diverse partners will analyse existing processes and methodologies for HTA. GETREAL will also generate a decision-making framework to help pharmaceutical companies design drug development strategies. A significant part of the project is devoted to organising training activities for researchers, healthcare decision makers and other stakeholders on relative effectiveness concepts and how they can be applied.
About IMI
The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is the world's largest public-private partnership in health. IMI is improving the environment for pharmaceutical innovation in Europe by engaging and supporting networks of industrial and academic experts in collaborative research projects. The European Union contributes €1 billion to the IMI research programme, and this is matched by in kind contributions worth at least another €1 billion from the member companies of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
The Innovative Medicines Initiative currently supports 46 projects, many of which are already producing impressive results. The projects are all working to address the biggest challenges in drug development, with the goal of accelerating the development of safer and more effective treatments for patients.