Galapagos Reaches Milestone in Servier Osteoarthritis Agreement
Galapagos of Belgium yesterday announced that they have reached milestones in its osteoarthritis alliance with Servier, resulting in a payment of 4 million euros from the French drugmaker.
In July 2010, teamed up for a collaboration that could be worth around 300 million euros to the Mechelen-based group, which is responsible for the discovery and development of new candidate drugs. Servier has an exclusive option to license these after the completion of Phase I trials.
Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common form of arthritis, typically affecting people aged 45 and older. It is a degenerative disease characterized by joint destruction and loss of cartilage. No currently available treatments prevent OA or even reverse or block the disease process. It is expected that with the aging of the population, more individuals will be prone to develop Osteoarthritis in the future.
Galapagos chief executive Onno van de Stolpe said the company has achieved “multiple milestones, including optimisation of a molecule against a novel OA target coming from our discovery platform”. He declared that “success like this continues to help us finance multiple shots on goal with novel proprietary targets in a number of disease areas”.
“We are very pleased with the progress of this alliance with Galapagos in osteoarthritis, a tough disease to tackle with no existing disease modifying treatment. This is in line with Servier`s commitment to develop disease-modifying drugs for sufferers of uncured diseases, such as OA, a debilitating disease that affects 12% of the world population, leading to severe and costly handicaps,” said Bernard Marchand, Head of Discovery Research at Servier.
In October, the companies initiated a second alliance, in oncology, whereby Galapagos will get research access fees of 2 million euros and various other milestone payments that could reach 260 million euros, plus royalties.
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