VERBAND FORSCHENDER ARZNEIMITTELHERSTELLER EV

Their core work

VFA is Germany's trade association for research-based pharmaceutical companies, representing member firms such as Bayer, Pfizer, Novartis, Roche, and around 45 other major drug developers operating in Germany. Their core function is industry representation, policy advocacy, and facilitating dialogue between the pharmaceutical sector, regulators, healthcare providers, and patients. In EU-funded research, VFA participates specifically through the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI2) — the public-private partnership between the EU and EFPIA — where they contribute the industry perspective to projects that cannot be led by a single company alone. Their value in consortia is coordination capacity and the ability to speak on behalf of the entire research-based pharma sector in Germany, making them a gateway to that industry community rather than a research laboratory in their own right.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects fall within a very narrow window (2017–2020), making a longitudinal trend analysis difficult — there is effectively no early-versus-late shift to detect. The two projects do, however, show complementary angles: DO-IT addressed systemic healthcare data and policy infrastructure, while PARADIGM addressed patient voice and co-creation of medicines — together suggesting VFA was positioning around the "medicines ecosystem" beyond pure R&D. Without projects beyond 2020, it is unclear whether this trajectory continued into digital health or real-world evidence, though those are the logical next steps given the IMI2 agenda.

VFA appears to be moving from system-level health policy toward patient-centred medicines development, which aligns with the broader IMI2 and IMI3 (IIHI) agenda — a prospective partner for consortia working on real-world evidence, decentralised clinical trials, or patient-reported outcomes.

How they like to work

VFA participates exclusively as a consortium partner, never as coordinator — consistent with its role as an industry association rather than a research-executing body. Despite only two projects, it has accumulated 55 unique consortium partners across 15 countries, a remarkably wide network for such a small project portfolio, reflecting the large, multi-stakeholder composition typical of IMI2 consortia. Working with VFA means access to its member company network and its ability to mobilise German pharma industry contacts, rather than laboratory capacity or IP generation.

With 55 unique partners across 15 countries from just two projects, VFA operates inside some of Europe's largest life sciences consortia, where IMI2 projects routinely include 20–30 organisations per grant. Their geographic reach spans at least a third of EU member states, typical for IMI2's pan-European design.

What sets them apart

VFA is not a research institute — it is the authoritative collective voice of research-based pharmaceutical companies in Germany, which is the EU's largest pharmaceutical market. In a consortium, their participation signals German pharma industry endorsement and provides a direct channel to member companies who are potential end-users, co-developers, or commercialisation partners for any resulting innovation. No university or CRO can replicate that function.

Highlights from their portfolio

• PARADIGM
  One of the first IMI2 initiatives to systematically embed patient communities as research co-designers rather than study subjects, making VFA's role here a marker of its engagement with patient-centred medicines policy.
• DO-IT
  Addressed the structural challenge of using big data across fragmented European healthcare systems for policy innovation — an IMI2-CSA (coordination and support) grant that shaped how the sector thinks about health data governance.