Galapagos has revealed that its service division, BioFocus DPI, has been recruited by Allergan to provide hit-finding services, including assay development and high-throughput screening services, for multiple numbers of its targets.
Under the new collaboration, the company said its computational chemists plan to work together with Allergan to select compounds from the Allergan and BioFocus DPI compound libraries for screening against the chosen targets.
The firm indicated that the total contract value could reach up to EUR 1.3m over the next 12 months, depending on the number of compounds screened.
BioFocus DPI has provided drug discovery services for Allergan since 2002 from its site in Basel, Switzerland.
"We are pleased to sign another collaboration with Allergan," said Onno van de Stolpe, CEO of Galapagos.
"They are an important customer for BioFocus DPI's biology business and having a satisfied customer coming back for more screening is gratifying."
Meanwhile, Evotec has announced that it has successfully completed the merger of US speciality pharma company Renovis, which it now counts as a wholly owned subsidiary.
The preclinical services firm first announced its intention to purchase Renovis in September last year for the agreed price of $151.8m (€108.9m; $4.75 per share).
Via the acquisition, Evotec gains gains its first US research facility - in California - along with five new drug discovery programmes at the preclinical stage.
In doing so, it continues with its plans to move further away from a services business to a fully fledged pharma company - Evotec's has been actively divulging a lot of its services business to concentrate instead on its own internal research; it has sold Evotec Technologies to PerkinElmer, transferred its library synthesis business into a joint venture with Indian RSIL, and sold its chemical development business to Aptuit.
A company spokesperson explained at the time of the announcement in September that Evotec is, however, still committed to continuing discovery services, such as screening and library synthesis services, and it will also use these areas to develop its own pipeline.
Going forward, the company will concentrate on new partnerships and alliances to generate cash.
In other news, Caliper Life Sciences has formed a collaboration with DiscoveRx Corporation that enables functional cell-based G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) assays from DiscoveRx to be performed on Caliper's LabChip platforms, in a move designed to "to assist pharmaceutical and biotechnology researchers in more efficiently discovering GPCR drugs".
"This collaboration will expand the capability of Caliper's LabChip technology into the dynamic GPCR drug discovery market, an opportunity with substantial potential due to the importance of GPCR drugs and the number of active R&D programs in neuroscience, cardiovascular, inflammation and other disease areas", said said Kevin Hrusovsky, CEO of Caliper.
"Through our collaboration with DiscoveRx, we have expanded our offerings to provide researchers with the ability to prosecute GPCR targets in a functional cellular assay for lead optimisation and profiling".
"Together, we are meeting the demand for GPCR and kinase lead optimization and profiling", added Pyare Khanna, CEO of DiscoveRx.
