Galapagos sells San Diego chemistry facility to ChemVentures

07-11-2008: Galapagos NV announced that it has completed the sale of its BioFocus DPI chemistry facility in San Diego to ChemVentures Pty Ltd, an Australian discovery research group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The San Diego facility currently employs 40 people and provides medicinal chemistry and custom library production services to pharmaceutical and biotech customers. ChemVentures intends to retain the employees at the San Diego site. The San Diego operations contributed around $4.8 million to the Galapagos revenues on an annual basis. Galapagos retains its guidance of total revenues of €75-80 million for the year 2008 and a year end cash position of around €25 million.

With the transaction, Galapagos completed the integration of BioFocus DPI's activities worldwide, according to the company. Going forward, BioFocus DPI operates sites in the UK (medicinal chemistry, biology services and compound libraries), USA (compound management), Switzerland (natural products and high throughput screening) and the Netherlands (target discovery and assay development).

"The decision to sell our San Diego site followed a thorough operational review of BioFocus DPI. We concluded that we are in a position to serve our customer base very well for medicinal chemistry and compound libraries out of our UK facility. By divesting the San Diego operation, we can improve our margins through reduced overhead and enhanced efficiency," said Onno van de Stolpe, CEO of Galapagos. "This transaction is further proof that we are committed to focussing on the strengths of our services business."