On 19 March 2025, the European Parliament’s SANT committee on public health invited our executive director Niklas Blomberg to an exchange of views about how the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) is driving health innovation through public-private partnerships.
While introducing IHI, Niklas stressed how bold collaborations are essential for advanced research. All of IHI’s projects are public-private partnerships, involving a range of participants from universities, industry, hospitals, SMEs, patient organisations and more, and this broad participation is key to their success, he emphasised.
Pointing to the example of health data, he said:
“This is an area where we are not going to make progress without public, private and civil society actors. We need the legitimacy of the public, we need the trust of the civil society and we need the innovation capabilities of Europe's industry.”
MEPs asked Niklas how IHI was addressing unmet public health needs such as women’s health, mental health and antimicrobial resistance. He highlighted the work of ConcePTION, which used real-world data to further our understanding of how medicines affect women who are pregnant and breastfeeding, and the AMR Accelerator, a programme consisting of 9 projects with a budget of €479 million that aims to progress the development of new drugs to combat AMR.
MEPs also inquired about how IHI and the European Parliament could help to address the challenges that are putting a brake on Europe’s competitiveness as outlined by the Draghi report.
In answer, Niklas set out how IHI contributes to excellent science, digital health, and artificial intelligence and real-world data in health, all of which were mentioned in the Draghi report as being essential if Europe is to prosper and grow competitively moving forwards. He bolstered his argument by describing how the clinical trial networks that IHI and IMI projects have established are helping to make Europe more attractive to industry.