Merck and Galapagos NV have agreed to end their development alliances, and Galapagos has regained worldwide rights for all assets in the programs. Merck will make a payment of $16.5 million to Galapagos for work completed in 2010. Galapagos has received a total of $28.7 million in upfront and milestone payments from the alliance and has regained worldwide rights to the targets discovered and assays developed from the collaboration.

“Changes in our early discovery strategy have required us to make some challenging decisions,” said Kathleen Metters, senior vice president, External Discovery and Preclinical Sciences, at Merck. “We look forward to investigating alternate opportunities to collaborate with Galapagos in the future.”

“In the alliances with Merck, we have discovered promising targets and developed target discovery assays for diseases with considerable unmet medical needs. Galapagos now owns these valuable assets which can form the basis for future alliances,” said Onno van de Stolpe, chief executive officer of Galapagos. “The work delivered to Merck last year also made a strong contribution to Galapagos’ financial results in 2010.”