Galapagos NV announced that its BioFocus service division has extended its collaboration with Chiesi Farmaceutici, a privately owned Italian pharmaceutical company, for a second time. This extension of the collaboration with Chiesi is valued at €2.8 million.

BioFocus and Chiesi began their collaboration in December 2009 and have now extended the agreement for a second time, until the end of 2012.

Under the terms of the integrated collaboration agreement, BioFocus will provide expanded medicinal chemistry resource, biology services, and an option to perform ADME services, for an undisclosed Chiesi therapeutic programme.

“BioFocus’ offering complements mid-size pharmaceutical companies like Chiesi by providing specialized technologies, such as high-throughput screening capabilities, and disease-specific expertise,” said Dr Chris Newton, SVP Services for Galapagos. “Our ability to add value to these research-minded organizations has been instrumental in building our substantial number of longrunning collaborations.”

“We look forward to entering the third year of our ongoing collaboration with BioFocus. As we continue to progress the project, we plan to further  utilize BioFocus’ knowhow in medicinal chemistry and ADME optimization,” said Dr Paolo Chiesi, R&D Director and vice-president of Chiesi Farmaceutici.

BioFocus provides integrated drug discovery that delivers pre-clinical drug candidates in all therapeutic areas with strong capability in neurodegenerative diseases, inflammatory diseases and with a growing track record of delivering candidates against rare and neglected diseases.

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