Galapagos Awarded €5.2 Million in Research Grants

Galapagos NV has announced 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.”