Galapagos gains grants of €5.2m

The Dutch drug discovery firm received €2.9m from the Dutch Ministries of Economic Affairs and Education, Culture and Science and will use it over an eight year period to advance its internal research programs in bone and joint diseases. Specifically this funding will be allocated toward developing new disease models to speed up the drug discovery process and technology to increase the success rate of candidate drugs through to clinical Phase II proof-of-concept (POC), and move them into the clinic faster. The second grant of €1.5m was given to Galapagos by Dutch foundation Top Institute Pharma. Using this funding Galapagos will collaborate over a four year period with Dutch biotech firm Agamyxis, the University Medical Center of Utrecht and the Hubrecht Institute, to identify novel cancer drugs. The remaining €0.8m was allocated to Galapagos to fund two three year projects aimed at developing high-throughput assays to study cancer progression as well as develop anti-cancer compounds. The money was provided as part of the European Union's Research Framework Programme. These cash injections are a welcome addition for the firm, which reported a profit erosion for the first half of 2007 amidst accelerated R&D spend and business reshuffling. The company's half-year operating loss of €17.2m was a large stretch from the €5.2m loss the firm reported in the first half of 2006, was is the comparable pre-tax loss. Galapagos spent nearly four times as much on R&D in the first half of this year and the cost of sales also shot up. The firm also incurred restructuring costs of €2.7m as it "works to integrate the companies obtained last year,"​ as well as a resultant doubling of administrative costs - these were the reasons given for the profit drop by chief financial officer David Smith.