ETX to receive two payments from Galapagos
e-therapeutics plc announces that it has met two key milestones in its collaboration with Galapagos NV ("Galapagos"), a commercial stage company specialised in the discovery and development of small molecule medicines with novel modes of action, with a focus on inflammation, fibrosis and kidney disease.
In line with its collaboration announced on 10 June 2020, the Company has met pre-defined operational and success-based milestones, resulting in two payments from Galapagos. Despite the global pandemic, the collaboration has remained on schedule.
e-therapeutics' proprietary, disease-agnostic computational platform centred around network biology enables in silico testing of millions of therapeutic hypotheses. This technology offers a solution to critical challenges in drug discovery through the generation and interrogation of in silico models of biological and disease processes. The Company leverages its platform to identify active compounds with associated mechanistic information as well as novel therapeutic targets.
Using its Network-driven Drug Discovery ("NDD") platform and know-how, e-therapeutics has successfully identified hit compounds against a specific biological process of interest to Galapagos involved in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis ("IPF") and potentially in other fibrotic indications. Further to the initial computational phase of the project, experimental testing of the computationally predicted compound set was carried out in several relevant assays and yielded a hit rate orders of magnitude higher than industry standards for early phenotypic drug discovery. The companies will now work to characterise these hits further.
Under the terms of the agreement with Galapagos, e-therapeutics is eligible to receive additional milestone payments through pre-clinical and clinical development as well as commercial milestones. The Company remains free to explore partnering opportunities in all other areas of biology relating to IPF and fibrosis.
e-therapeutics' ability to model human disease processes effectively in silico addresses critical limitations of the drug discovery process. Our deeper understanding of underlying disease biology and ability to test millions of possible therapeutic interventions computationally ahead of experimental validation have the potential to mitigate late-stage, costly failures in drug development. The progress made to date in our collaboration with Galapagos to discover novel therapeutics in IPF and fibrosis is yet another validation of our technology platform, which can be applied to any therapeutic area.
Ali Mortazavi
Chief Executive Officer
Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) Disclosure - Certain information contained in this announcement would have been deemed inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of Regulation (EU) No 596/2014 until the release of this announcement.