The Galapagos Islands inspired Charles Darwin to develop his theory of evolution, and now Belgium-based Galapagos may be able to teach us something about the evolution of fragment-based drug discovery: the company recently announced the purchase of Sareum’s structure-based drug discovery services unit. A few days later, UK-based Sareum announced that it was discontinuing internal laboratory research.
Sareum’s platform focused on the crystallographic discovery and recombination of fragments; Galapagos is planning to merge these capabilities with their BioFocus DPI contract services group.
The price? Just £ 553,000, or a little more than $ 1,000,000 at the time of the announcement.
What conclusions can be drawn from this acquisition? On the one hand, clearly Galapagos feels the technology has value. On the other, a million dollars doesn’t go far these days; it would be difficult to put together the platform Sareum has been building since 2003 for this sort of money.
Obviously a single data point can not lead to a whole theory, but it does spawn many hypotheses. What does this mean for service-based business models? For valuations of European vs US companies? For the value (fiscal and scientific) of fragment-based drug discovery in general?
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