Today, Galapagos announced the purchase of Argenta Discovery 2009 Ltd., a privately held contract research drug discovery company with 140 employees. This company will operate under the name ‘Argenta’ as a Galapagos drug discovery service division. Together with BioFocus, the two companies will provide high quality services to the discovery research communities. The pairing-up of two profitable operations within the financially strong Galapagos Group will further maintain stability and hence credibility in the eyes of our client communities.

The dual services business will continue to operate under the separate brand-names Argenta and BioFocus, and will be marketed separately.  As a number of our clients will know, sometimes in the past both companies have had to decline projects due to existing conflicts of interest.  In the future, having two separate organizations will allow us to offer the other organization as service provider and will allow us to fulfil responsibilities to our clients with complete confidence that the IP we are generating for our clients is independently created.

Both BioFocus and Argenta will be able to expand the offering, by obtaining arms-length access to certain IP independent capabilities, such as pre-clinical development (formulation) and PK capabilities at Argenta (for BioFocus clients) and synthetic compound libraries and  protein crystallography at BioFocus (for Argenta clients).

Dr. John Montana will continue as Managing Director of Argenta and will be responsible for all Argenta’s operations and Argenta’s sales and marketing activities. He reports to me in my new role as Senior Vice President, Galapagos Services.

I am extremely pleased with Argenta joining the Galapagos Group, and I am sure that both BioFocus and Argenta will flourish in this new situation. We will work hard to continue to provide the excellent quality of work you are used to from both companies, and hope that the expanded offering will be well received by our current and future customers.

Kind regards

Chris Newton

SVP Galapagos Services