Although major advances have been made during recent years regarding the pathogenesis of several human diseases, leading to the identification of a number of potential new therapeutic targets, only a limited number of innovative drugs have been approved by regulatory authorities for widespread use. The reason is that drug development has become a more difficult and costly process. Furthermore, it appears that treatments developed for given diseases will only benefit a fraction of patients with specific characteristics. Therefore, there is an important need for reliable assays allowing to predict the efficiency and safety of new drugs, and to identify the patients who are the appropriate candidates to receive them.

IMI scientists develop such biomarkers which can be based on immunological measurements, genomic or proteomic assays, or molecular imaging. Research projects in this field are currently focused on two disease areas: (1) the hypereosinophilic syndromes in which biomarkers are developed with the objective to tailor treatment with glucocorticoids, tyrosine kinase inhibitors or anti-interleukin-5 monoclonal antibody according to a novel patients' stratification and (2) multiple sclerosis, a disease for which we developed novel assays to predict therapeutic responses to biotherapies based on beta-interferon or natalizumab.