Breakthrough Therapies and Innovative Models for Autoimmune Diseases

Galapagos is a commercial-stage biotechnology company, specialised in the discovery and development of small molecule medicines with novel modes of action. Galapagos is seeking research in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) or intestinal bowel diseases (IBD), among other autoimmune/inflammatory diseases. 

Targets and Therapeutic Interventions

• Research focusing on novel MoA/pathways/targets involved in RA, IBD or other inflammatory/autoimmune disorders that can be targeted to: 1) Re-establish the balance in inflammation by skewing pro-inflammatory cell types towards regulatory/tolerogenic cell types. 2) Modulate stromal cells in a disease-relevant context
• Compounds with first-in-class potential, with cellular phenotypic activity and/or in vivo efficacy data
• Drug modalities of interest: New chemical entities, including small molecules, PROTAC-based compounds and oligonucleotide silencing approaches

Research Disease Models

• Rodent in vivo, or human in vitro disease models that recapitulate the disease biology of RA patients refractory to anti-TNFα treatments
• Human in vitro Treg (skewing) assay compatible with molecular tools (siRNA, shRNA, CRISPR) in a medium/high throughput format which is amenable for target identification

Out of Scope

• Targets with no competitive edge, MoA for which therapeutics are already on the market or in clinical development
• Therapies focused on modulation of the microbiome in IBD
• Therapeutic antibodies, gene therapies, cell therapies

Stage of Development: Opportunities from basic research through to clinical phase II, with highest interest in opportunities with validation data available

Incentives for Academics: Research collaboration, licencing of assets, expansion of expertise in infancy, joint testing of models and methods.

Submission Information: Submission of research overviews are encouraged through the submission form, which can be downloaded here