Galapagos gets $1.4M milestone from Wyeth

Belgium's Galapagos NV says that US drug major Wyeth has exercised its right to license three proprietary bone anabolic drug targets from their 2003 research agreement in osteoporosis, resulting in a 1.05 million-euro ($1.4 million) milestone payment to Galapagos.

This is the second milestone reached in the osteoporosis collaboration initiated in November 2003. As part of the accord, Galapagos has applied its osteoporosis disease expertise to discover and validate novel drug targets for Wyeth. In November 2004, Wyeth selected a set of these targets for internal validation.

Under the terms of the companies' agreement, Galapagos could receive milestone payments of up to 30.0 million euros from the accord. The targets involved in the Wyeth collaboration are unrelated to the suite of proprietary validated targets in Galapagos' own osteoporosis program, the firms noted.