Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Essex-based BioFocus DPI has announced a second major research contract this month, taking the total value of deals past $3 million.

Parent company, Galapagos NV, has signed a $1.8 million (£0.92m) drug discovery research agreement with University College London to be handled by BioFocus less than two weeks after a £0.67m deal to provide hit-finding services for multiple Allergan Inc targets.

The latest research project is part of an ongoing UCL program for the treatment of vascular collapse during sepsis collapsing of blood vessels due to systemic infection by a pathogen.

As well as providing medicinal chemistry services BioFocus will offer UCL absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion screening facilities during appropriate stages of the work, scheduled over two years.

BioFocus's Basel, Switzerland, site has provided drug discovery services for Allergan since 2002. In this new collaboration, BioFocus will provide assay development and highthroughput screening services for several Allergan targets.

BioFocus's computational chemists also plan to work with Allergan to select compounds from their respective compound libraries for screening against these.