"We are excited that we have now partnered our asthma program with the leading player in this disease area" said Onno van de Stolpe, CEO of Galapagos. "The licensing of our targets to GSK is a strong endorsement of our discovery platform and disease expertise".
"This long term alliance with one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world is an important milestone for our recently established service unit" said Andrea Grant, Managing Director of Galádeno. "We are looking forward to be working with GSK's disease experts over the coming years and we are confident that we will deliver a continuous stream of novel, well-validated drug targets to their compound screening programs".
About Galapagos & Galádeno
Galapagos is a genomics based drug discovery company with programs in osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, Alzheimer's disease and asthma. Proprietary targets and compounds resulting from Galapagos' programs are both developed internally and selectively out-licensed.
Galádeno, Galapagos' services unit, provides reagents and functional screens to leading pharmaceutical, biotech and nutraceutical companies for rapid identification and validation of novel drug targets.
Together they currently employ 70 people, including 22 PhD's, and occupy a discovery research facility in Mechelen, Belgium, and a reagent and services business unit in Leiden, The Netherlands. Partners include Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Celgene, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Vertex and Wyeth.
Galapagos was founded in 1999 by Crucell (Nasdaq, Euronext: CRXL) and Tibotec to exploit Crucell's unique PER.C6® technology for target discovery. The shareholders include Abingworth, Apax, Burrill, AlpInvest, Crucell and Tibotec-Virco.
More information can be found at www.galapagosgenomics.com.