Business Weekly November 16th 2006

BioFocus wins roaring contract from LEO

BioFocus DPI has landed a £2.27 million deal to supply and develop compounds for use in Danish pharmaceutical LEO Pharma’s antibacterial research programme.

The Chesterford Research Park-based company, now the service division for Belgium’s Galapagos NV, will use a subset of its natural compound collection for high throughput screening, hit verification, and profiling of selected compounds.

In return, Galapagos stands to receive up to £270k in project fees and up to £2.0m in milestone payments.

Galapagos may also receive royalties on sales of commercial products resulting from the collaboration.

Dr Tore Duvold, VP for drug discovery at LEO Pharma, said: “We at LEO Pharma are delighted to enter into this collaboration with BioFocus DPI and expect that gaining access to their significant repository of natural product subfractions will strengthen our antibiotic drug discovery program.

“We trust this will be the start of a successful and long term arrangement to discover new pharmaceutical natural products.”

Natural compounds are a major source of new medicines, as nearly half of drugs brought to market in the last 20 years originated from compounds derived from nature.

BioFocus DPI’s natural compound collections are based on bacterial and fungal sources, which offer different characteristics to those from synthetic chemistry collections, including high chemical and functional diversity, potent pharmacological activities over a broad range of biological targets, and desirable physicochemical properties.

Galapagos CEO, Onno van de Stolpe, said: “We are pleased with this new collaboration in many ways. 

“Not only do we initiate a relationship with LEO Pharma, but we also confirm the interest from the market for our newly-acquired natural compounds collection and technologies by landing this high-value deal within only a few months after closing the DPI transaction.”