Galapagos NV and CHDI Foundation, Inc, a non-profit virtual biotech pursuing therapies for Huntington's disease has entered into a new five-year collaboration focused on discovering novel drugs for Huntington's disease. Galapagos' service division BioFocus will perform the research and is eligible to receive US$ 41 million (€31 million) in research fees during the five-year collaboration.

BioFocus will apply its full range of integrated drug discovery services for this program. Integrated biology and chemistry capabilities will be supported by BioFocus' expertise in complex primary neuronal assay development, high-content screening, fragment-based screening, computational chemistry, ADME/PK and protein crystallography. The new agreement announced today continues and expands the collaboration started in August 2005.

"Having collaborated with CHDI since 2005 in therapeutic target discovery, we are eager to continue working together to develop novel therapies for Huntington's disease and meet this urgent medical need," said Onno van de Stolpe, CEO of Galapagos. "We are confident that the next five years of this long-standing relationship with CHDI will be as productive as the first five."

"BioFocus has delivered expert technologies and experienced staff to therapeutic target and drug discovery research in the fight against Huntington's disease," said Ignacio Munoz-Sanjuan, vice-president, Biology at CHDI. "This has encouraged us to extend and expand the collaboration, with the ultimate goal of finding disease-modifying treatments for Huntington's."

CHDI Foundation is a privately-funded, not-for-profit, virtual biotech company that is exclusively dedicated to rapidly discovering and developing therapies that slow the progression of Huntington's disease (HD).

BioFocus aims to expand its partners' drug pipelines by accelerating the gene-to-drug candidate discovery process.

Galapagos is a mid-size biotechnology company specialized in the discovery and development of small molecule and antibody therapies with novel modes-of-action.