It’s another wild twist in the story of Galapagos, a company that has been around for more than 25 years but has yet to get a therapy approved.
After some additional thought and market developments, Galapagos is reversing course on a series of plans that involved spinning out a portion of the company and finding a new CEO over the next year. Paul Stoffels will still exit the company, just sooner than expected. And the Belgian biotech will explore the potential sale of a clutch of cell therapy assets, which Stoffels brought into the company’s fold through a series of acquisitions over the past three years.
It’s another wild twist in the story of Galapagos. The company, which has been around for more than a quarter century, has yet to get a therapy approved. A series of clinical failures stacked up before Stoffels took the helm in 2022 and promised a turnaround in five years. But his departure was announced two years shy of that timeframe, and now, it seems, the company is abandoning what Stoffels built and sending the former Johnson & Johnson exec out the door early.
Stoffels is to be replaced as CEO of Galapagos by Henry Gosebruch, who had been appointed CEO of the new spinout company in April. Stoffels has also been replaced as chair of the Galapagos board by Jérôme Contamine, but he will remain involved in an advisory capacity, specifically focused on finding a home for the company’s cell therapy assets.
The strategy is an about-face from plans announced in early January—a move triggered by unspecificed “regulatory and market developments,” Galapagos said in a Tuesday release. Instead of spinning out a new company with $2.5 billion in capital to execute deals for new assets, Galapagos will conduct “transformative business development transactions” in house while exploring strategic alternatives for the cell therapy assets that it had previously planned to keep under the company banner.
The spinout had been expected to be completed mid-year, and Galapagos had already taken strides toward the reorganization. But with about a month and a half to go until the end of the second quarter, Gosebruch will now be in charge of leading the strategic process to evaluate Galapagos’ existing assets and use the resources previously earmarked for the spinout to build a new pipeline via business development.
“We are currently evaluating strategic options regarding our clinical programs and other assets,” new CEO Gosebruch said in a statement. “I look forward to working with Paul [Stoffels] in finding a value-maximizing alternative for the cell therapy business including exploring mergers, divestures, and out-licensing. In parallel, we will pursue transformative business development opportunities in order to build an innovative pipeline with the potential to deliver differentiated medicines for patients.”
Among the cell therapy assets Stoffels is house hunting for are Galapagos’ lead program GLPG5101 and the company’s decentralized cell therapy manufacturing platform. The GLPG5101 program spanned a handful of B cell blood cancers, including mantle cell lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The most advanced was a Phase II clinical trial for follicular lymphoma or marginal zone lymphoma.
