Galapagos extends drug discovery collaboration with Amgen

Galapagos has announced that its service division BioFocus DPI has expanded and extended its longstanding drug discovery collaboration with Amgen through to 2008.

BioFocus DPI will continue to provide biology, computational and medicinal chemistry services and will supply biologically-directed library compounds to Amgen's discovery programs.

Under the terms of the extended agreement, Galapagos will receive an upfront fee of US$2.4 million as a payment for 2007 research costs.

The initial collaboration, announced in January 2003, involves the identification of lead candidates against multiple ion channel targets. The agreement announced today expands this collaboration to include all classes of targets, including ion channel, GPCR and kinase targets, and also Bio-Focus DPI's compound collection comprising 700,000 synthetic small molecules and its proprietary natural product compound collection containing 145,000 pre-purified subfractions, pure natural products, and semi-synthetic natural products.

'The additional breadth and depth gained by Bio-Focus DPI's drug discovery offering this year have helped us to expand our strong collaborative relationship with Amgen,' said Onno van de Stolpe, Galapagos ceo.

'We are excited that the potential hits arising from BioFocus DPI's unique library collections could provide promising lead candidates for Amgen's discovery programs over the next two year,' he added.