Our R&D
Our contribution to Europe’s global leadership in life sciences
Our Research and development
Our contribution to Europe’s global leadership in life sciences
R&D
A leader in cardiology, the ambition of the Servier Group is to become a renowned and innovative player in oncology. Its growth is based on a sustained commitment to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, oncology, neuroscience and immuno-inflammatory diseases.
Keyfacts about Servier’s R&D:
An independent group headed by a Foundation. It allows Servier to reinvest over 20 % of its brand-name medicines revenue in R&D every year.
Dedicating over 70% of its global R&D budget (brand-name activity) to researching cancer treatments.
Heavily present in Europe, four research centers are in the EU and 98% of APIs for princeps are produced in Europe
A partner of choice, with numerous partnerships with pharmaceutical groups, biotech companies, academic partners and patients, to ensure their voices are at the heart of our activities, from research to support beyond the pill.
A portfolio which gathers a comprehensive healthcare offering, from brand name medicines and quality generics to digital technology, aiming to advance tomorrow’s healthcare to improve lives of patients on a daily basis.
Keyfacts about Servier’s R&D:
An independent group headed by a Foundation. It allows Servier to reinvest over 20 % of its brand-name medicines revenue in R&D every year.
Dedicating 50 % of our global R&D budget (brand-name activity) to researching cancer treatments.
Heavily present in Europe, four research centers are in the EU and 98% of APIs for princeps are produced in Europe
A partner of choice, with numerous partnerships with pharmaceutical groups, biotech companies, academic partners and patients, to ensure their voices are at the heart of our activities, from research to support beyond the pill.
Servier’s portfolio gathers a comprehensive healthcare offering, from brand name medicines and quality generics to digital technology, aiming to advance tomorrow’s healthcare to improve lives of patients on a daily basis.
Partnerships
Our partnership approach serves one goal: to bring life-changing treatments to patients faster. We strive to always put patients first, leading to better outcomes for ourselves and our partners.
Innovative Medicines Initiative – IMI
IMI1 (2008-2013)
In December 2007, the European Commission created the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking, a public-private partnership (PPP) between the European Community, represented by the European Commission, and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). With €2 billion budget (half of it coming from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme, the other half coming in the form of in-kind contributions from EFPIA and its member companies) it became the largest life sciences PPP in the world.
By the end of 2013, 11 calls for proposals were released, resulting in 59 projects focused on several different topics (such as neurological conditions, diabetes, oncology, inflammation and infection as well as tackling challenges in drug development). The IMI projects delivered scientific breakthroughs that would not have been possible without the PPP model.
IMI2
The success of the IMI1 programme prompted the European Commission and EFPIA to take steps to continue IMI under Horizon 2020, the European Commission’s framework programme for research and innovation that runs from 2014 to 2020. IMI2 was officially launched in July 2014, with a budget of up to €3.276 billion following the same structure as IMI1. The Strategic Research Agenda for IMI2, remains focused on the needs of patients and society,
and on delivering tools and resources to speed up the development and patient access of urgently-needed treatments. Regular Calls for proposals and projects have been launched. These include projects on diseases that have been part of the IMI portfolio since the beginning (e.g. diabetes and dementia) as well as new, large scale programmes on Ebola and ‘Big Data for Better Outcomes’.
Servier in IMI
Servier has been involved in numerous projects and this has brought many positive impacts, including being part of a larger network and collaborating with various stakeholders. Servier is deeply convinced by the opportunities raised by participating within IMI and collaborating on pre-competitive aspects across all types of topics.
For example, the PARADIGM project in which Servier participates, aims to make patients become active members in research, and gathers 33 other partners, such as patient groups, other pharmaceutical companies, national authorities and research foundations. Recently, in coherence with our developing pipeline, Servier has taken the lead of an IMI project which supports the development of engineered T-cells.
Some examples of IMI Projects
Paradigm (Patients Active in Research and Dialogues for an Improved Generation of Medicines)
There is growing recognition that patients can and should be more involved in the medicines’ development process. However, many stakeholders still have questions on how to put this principle into practice. The PARADIGM project, which started on the 1st of March 2018, aims to provide a framework for structured, effective, meaningful and ethical patient engagement and demonstrate the ‘return on engagement’ for all stakeholders.
Ultimately, the team hopes that the project will help patient engagement to become a reality and standard practice, helping to improve research and deliver results that are focused on patients’ needs.
MELLODDY
The vast amounts of data generated during drug discovery are not always used optimally, meaning scientists miss out on opportunities to make new discoveries using old data. One challenge lies in the fact that much of this data is owned by companies, and making it readily available to others would affect their competitiveness. The MELLODDY project, started on the 1st of June 2019 aims to establish a machine learning platform that would make it possible to learn from multiple sets of proprietary data while respecting their highly confidential nature. Through this innovative, blockchain-based solution, the pharmaceutical companies in the project aim to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with an unprecedented volume of competitive data in the form of over a billion drug-development-relevant data points, and hundreds of terabytes of image data that annotate the biological effects of more than 10 million small molecules. The hope is that this solution will deliver insights that will advance drug development by making it easier to identify which small molecules show the most promise for further research. To know more about this project please click here.
C4C
Less than half of all authorised medicines commonly used to treat children have been properly tested in this age group, and running clinical trials involving children is difficult. The conect4children (c4c) project, initiated on May 1st 2018, aims to create a sustainable, integrated pan-European collaborative paediatric network that will speed up and facilitate the running of high quality clinical trials in children while ensuring that the voices of young patients and their families are heard. One focus of the project is to promote innovative trial designs that will support drug development for rare paediatric diseases and areas of high medical need. Ultimately, the paediatric clinical trials network will contribute to the development of better medicines for babies, children and young people. To know more about this project, please click here.
Paradigm
Paradigm is an ongoing project (started the 1st of March 2018) which aims to provide a framework for structured, effective, meaningful and ethical patient engagement and demonstrates the ‘return on engagement’ for all stakeholders. Building on existing initiatives, the consortium is developping a comprehensive set of tools and practices to support the integration of patient perspectives into drug development and enhance trust among different stakeholders. The project is focusing on three decision-making points in the medicines development process: research and priority setting; clinical trial design; and early dialogues with regulators and health technology assessment (HTA) bodies. Ultimately, the goal is to help patient engagement to become a reality and standard practice, improving research and to deliver results that are focused on patients’ needs. To know more about this project, please click here.
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The future of IMI
With IMI2 coming to an end, a new cross-sectoral public-private partnership on health, called the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI), has been launched to further new discoveries for the period 2022-2027. Taking place in the framework of Horizon Europe (the research and innovation framework for 2021-2027), this new PPP reflects the growing integration of technology in healthcare solutions by bringing together four trade associations representing human health (EFPIA, EuropaBio) and health technology sectors (COCIR, MedTech Europe).
This will ensure that the new partnership increases Europe’s translational research capabilities and delivers innovative medicines and solutions for patients. Additionally, this new partnership has been flagged by the European Commission as one of the initiatives to fulfill its Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe, by contributing to enhance patient-oriented health systems.