Mechelen,
Belgium; 16 October 2007 – Galapagos NV (Euronext
& LSE: GLPG) announced today that Galapagos and its
service division BioFocus DPI have been awarded a total
of €5.2 million in grants from the Netherlands and
the EU. The grants support the development of candidate
drugs for various indications, including Galapagos’
core programs in bone and joint diseases.
Under
these grants, Galapagos and BioFocus DPI will collaborate
in consortia with academia, R&D institutes and companies.
Galapagos is to receive the following amounts over the duration
of the grants:
• €2.9 million from the SmartMix program through
the Dutch Ministries of Economic Affairs and Education,
Culture and Science. This eight-year program will focus
on developing new disease models to speed up the drug discovery
process in bone and joint diseases. The technology developed
under the program aims to increase the success rate through
to clinical Phase II Proof-of-Concept and reduce the time
to get candidate drugs into the clinic.
•
€1.5 million from the Dutch foundation Top Institute
Pharma to identify novel cancer drugs. Galapagos will collaborate
with Dutch biotechnology company Agamyxis, the University
Medical Center Utrecht and the Hubrecht Institute in a four-year
program.
•
€0.8 million for two programs from the EU’s 6th
and 7th Research Framework Programmes. The goal of each
of these three-year projects is to develop high-throughput
assays to study cancer progression and develop anti-cancer
compounds in a time and cost effective manner.
"These grants enable us to accelerate our internal
discovery activities in bone and joint diseases and also
to apply our technologies in other areas of unmet medical
need", said Onno van de Stolpe, CEO of Galapagos. "The
continued government support has helped Galapagos to become
a leader in bone and joint disease research and a global
provider of cutting-edge drug discovery services.”
About Galapagos
Galapagos (Euronext Brussels, GLPG; Euronext Amsterdam,
GLPGA; London AiM: GLPG) is a drug discovery company with
pre-clinical programs in bone and joint diseases and cachexia.
Its division BioFocus DPI offers a full suite of target-to-drug
discovery products and services to pharmaceutical and biotech
companies, encompassing target discovery and validation,
screening and drug discovery through to delivery of pre-clinical
candidates. BioFocus DPI also provides adenoviral reagents
for rapid identification and validation of novel drug targets,
compound libraries for drug screening as well as chemogenomics
and ADMET database products to select targets and compounds.
Galapagos currently employs 460 people and operates facilities
in seven countries, with global headquarters in Mechelen,
Belgium. More information about Galapagos and BioFocus DPI
can be found at www.glpg.com
and www.biofocusdpi.com.
About SmartMix
SmartMix is a Dutch subsidy program that supports innovators
who work together. SmartMix encourages economic, civil-societal
and cultural innovation that will enable the Netherlands
to excel both nationally and internationally. Companies
and/or civil-society organisations will work together with
knowledge institutes like universities on a very broad range
of subjects to realise this, on the basis of questions from
the market and society. The idea for SmartMix came from
the Innovatieplatform (Innovation Platform). It is one of
a series of funding instruments that the Dutch Ministry
of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Education, Culture
and Science are deploying to stimulate innovation.
The
SmartMix Consortium ‘A new generation of efficient
biomedical research tools’ consists of the following
participants: Universities of Leiden and Nijmegen, Amsterdam
Medical Center, Amsterdam VU Medical Center, Hubrecht Institute,
GlaxoSmithKline, Merck Serono, Galapagos, Arthrogen, ZF
Screens, Progentix, Fytagoras and Serpo.
About
TI Pharma
Top Institute Pharma aims to achieve leadership in research
and education in areas that are critical for the international
competitive position of the pharmaceutical industry. The
Institute conducts groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary research
and offers advanced training programs focused on improving
the efficiency of the entire process of drug discovery and
development. This will eventually reduce the 'time- &
cost-to-patient' of new medicines and contribute to the
well-being of society. TI Pharma devotes special attention
to the Priority Medicines project of the World Health Organization.
More information can be found at www.tipharma.com.
About
the EU’s Research Framework Programme
The primary goal of the EU Research Framework Programme
is to strengthen the scientific and technological basis
for the Community's industry and to foster its international
competitiveness as well as to support all research efforts
which are considered necessary for other policies of the
Community.
CONTACT
Galapagos NV
Onno van de Stolpe, CEO
Tel: +31 6 2909 8028
ir@glpg.com
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